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THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAM 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE RESEARCH 
MAGNIFICENT 


BY 

ir .Pi 


hpgAvells 

II 

AUTHOR OF “THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC 
HARMAN,” ETC. 


ileto gorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


1922 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




TZs 

. V V • A <eS 

4 


Copyright, 1915, 
By H. G. WELLS. 


Set up and electrotyped. Published September. 1915, 

ty 


transfer 

D. O. PUBLIC LIBRARY 
SBPT. 10 , 1940 


FERRIS 

PRINTING COMPANY 
NEW YORK. CITY 



472523 

sffsssss^ 


tcD 

p 

CONTENTS 

p 

THE PRELUDE 

On Fear and 

m 

CN 

CD 

Aristocracy 

THE STORY 


CHAPTER 


* CHAPTER 

i>- I. The Boy grows up 59 

c-~* 

II. The Young Man about Town 127 

J^HL Amanda 180 

^IV. The Spirited Honeymoon 224 

V. The Assize of Jealousy 281 

^VI. The New IIaroun al Raschid .... 381 

O' 

LU 

> 

5 
































4 





















THE PRELUDE 



THE RESEARCH 
MAGNIFICENT 


THE PRELUDE 
On Fear and Aristocracy 

§1 

The story of William Porphyry Benham is the 
story of a man who was led into adventure by an 
idea. It was an idea that took possession of his 
imagination quite early in life, it grew with him 
and changed with him, it interwove at last com- 
pletely with his being. His story is its story. It 
was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it 
was manifestly present in his mind at the very 
last moment of his adventurous life. He belonged 
to that fortunate minority who are independent of 
daily necessities, so that he was free to go about 
the world under its direction. It led him far. It 
led him into situations that bordered upon the 
fantastic, it made him ridiculous, it came near to 
making him sublime. And this idea of his was of 
such a nature that in several aspects he could docu- 
ment it. Its logic forced him to introspection and 
to the making of a record. 

3 


4 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


An idea that can play so large a part in a life must 
necessarily have something of the complication and 
protean quality of life itself. It is not to be stated 
justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an 
epigram. As well one might show a man’s skeleton 
for his portrait. Yet, essentially, Benham’s idea 
was simple. He had an incurable, an almost in- 
nate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and 
thoroughly. His commoner expression for that 
thorough living is “the aristocratic life.” But by 
“aristocratic” he meant something very different 
from the quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or 
an English peer. He meant an intensity, a clear- 
ness. . . . Nobility for him was to get something 
out of his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a 
splendour — it is a thing easier to understand than 
to say. 

One might hesitate to call this idea “innate,” 
and yet it comes soon into a life when it comes at 
all. In Benham’s case we might trace it back to 
the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it 
stirring already at the petticoat stage, in various 
private struttings and valiant dreamings with a 
helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal sword. 
We have most of us been at least as far as that with 
Benham. And we have died like Horatius, slay- 
ing our thousands for our country, or we have 
perished at the stake or faced the levelled muskets 
of the firing party — “No, do not bandage my 
eyes” — because we would not betray the secret 
path that meant destruction to our city. But with 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


5 


Benham the vein was stronger, and it increased 
instead of fading out as he grew to manhood. It 
was less obscured by those earthy acquiescences, 
those discretions, that saving sense of proportion, 
which have made most of us so satisfactorily what 
we are. “ Porphyry/’ his mother had discovered 
before he was seventeen, “is an excellent boy, a 
brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a little un- 
balanced/ ’ 

The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the 
story of him, is that. 

Most of us are — balanced ; in spite of occasional 
reveries we do come to terms with the limitations of 
life, with those desires and dreams and discretions 
that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we 
take refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate 
ourselves on a certain amiable freedom from prig- 
gishness or presumption, but for Benham that easy 
declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is 
did not occur. He found his limitations soon 
enough ; he was perpetually rediscovering them, 
but out of these interments of the spirit he rose 
again — remarkably. When we others have de- 
cided that, to be plain about it, we are not going 
to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is too 
ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have 
done so because there were other conceptions of 
existence that were good enough for us, we decided 
that instead of that glorious impossible being of our- 
selves,' we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fel- 
lows, or sly dogs, or sane, sound, capable men or 


6 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


brilliant successes, and so forth — practicable things. 
For Benham, exceptionally, there were not these 
practicable things. He blundered, he fell short of 
himself, he had — as you will be told — some astonish- 
ing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for long. 
He went by nature for this preposterous idea of 
nobility as a linnet hatched in a cage will try to fly. 

And when he discovered — and in this he was 
assisted not a little by his friend at his elbow — ■ 
when he discovered that Nobility was not the simple 
thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself 
in a mood only slightly disconcerted to the discovery 
of Nobility. When it dawned upon him, as it did, 
that one cannot be noble, so to speak, in vacuo, he 
set himself to discover a Noble Society. He began 
with simple beliefs and fine attitudes and ended in a 
conscious research. If he could not get through by a 
stride, then it followed that he must get through by a 
climb. He spent the greater part of his life studying 
and experimenting in the noble possibilities of man. 
He never lost his absurd faith in that conceivable 
splendour. At first it was always just round the 
corner or just through the wood ; to the last it seemed 
still but a little way beyond the distant mountains. 

For this reason this story has been called The 
Research Magnificent. It was a real research, it 
was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven 
Street that at last were as much as one could call 
his home, he had accumulated material for — one 
hesitates to call it a book — let us say it was an 
analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


7 


his tragic death came his old friend White, the 
journalist and novelist, under a promise, and found 
these papers; he found them to the extent of a 
crammed bureau, half a score of patent files quite 
distended and a writing-table drawer-full, and he 
was greatly exercised to find them. They were, 
White declares, they are still after much experienced 
handling, an indigestible aggregation. On this 
point WRite is very assured. WTien Benham thought 
he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, 
WRite says. There is no book in it. . . . 

Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was 
dreaming when he thought the noble life a human 
possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the 
hyaena and the tapeworm and many other of God’s 
necessary but less attractive creatures, is not for 
such exalted ends. That doubt never seems to have 
got a lodgment in Benham’s skull ; though at times 
one might suppose it the basis of White’s thought. 
You will find in all Benham’s story, if only it can 
be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed 
and distressed, but always traceable, this startled, 
protesting question, “But why the devil aren’t we?” 
As though necessarily we ought to be. He never 
faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy 
face of this world, the earthy stubbornness, the base- 
ness and dulness of himself and all of us, lurked the 
living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things 
unspeakable. At first it seemed to him that one had 
only just to hammer and will, and at the end, after 
a life of willing and hammering, he was still con- 


8 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


vinced there was something, something in the nature 
of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate 
than one had supposed at first, a little more difficult 
to secure, but still in that nature, which would sud- 
denly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the 
universe, that precious cave at the heart of all 
things, in which one must believe. 

And then life — life would be the wonder it so 
perplexingly just isn’t. . . . 

§2 

Benham did not go about the world telling people 
of this consuming research. He was not the prophet 
or preacher of his idea. It was too living and intri- 
cate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely 
about. It was his secret self ; to expose it casually 
would have shamed him. He drew all sorts of re- 
serves about him, he wore his manifest imperfections 
turned up about him like an overcoat in bitter wind. 
He was content to be inexplicable. His thoughts 
led him to the conviction that this magnificent re- 
search could not be, any more than any other research 
can be, a solitary enterprise, but he delayed expres- 
sion ; in a mighty writing and stowing away of these 
papers he found a relief from the unpleasant urgency 
to confess and explain himself prematurely. So that 
White, though he knew Benham with the intimacy 
of an old schoolfellow who had renewed his friend- 
ship, and had shared his last days and been a witness 
of his death, read the sheets of manuscript often with 
surprise and with a sense of added elucidation. 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


9 


And, being also a trained maker of books, White 
as he read was more and more distressed that an 
accumulation so interesting should be so entirely un- 
shaped for publication. “But this will never make a 
book,” said White with a note of personal grievance. 
His hasty promise in their last moments together 
had bound him, it seemed, to a task he now found 
impossible. He would have to work upon it tre- 
mendously; and even then he did not see how it 
could be done. 

This collection of papers was not a story, not an 
essay, not a confession, not a diary. It was — 
nothing definable. It went into no conceivable 
covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. 
A vast proliferation. It wanted even a title. There 
were signs that Benham had intended to call it The 
Aristocratic Life , and that he had tried at some 
other time the title of An Essay on Aristocracy. 
Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he 
had been disposed to drop the word “aristocratic” 
altogether, and adopt some such phrase as The 
Larger Life. Once it was Life Set Free. He had 
fallen away more and more from nearly everything 
that one associates with aristocracy — at the end 
only its ideals of fearlessness and generosity remained. 

Of all these titles The Aristocratic Life seemed at 
first most like a clue to White. Benham’s erratic 
movements, his sudden impulses, his angers, his 
unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange 
places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be 
pure adventurousness, could all be put into system 


10 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


with that. Before White had turned over three 
pages of the great fascicle of manuscript that was 
called Book Two, he had found the word “Bushido” 
written with a particularly flourishing capital letter 
and twice repeated. “That was inevitable,” said 
White with the comforting regret one feels at a 
friend’s banalities. “And it dates . . . Yes — 
this was early. ...” 

“Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,” he 
read presently, “has still to be discovered and under- 
stood. This is the necessary next step for mankind. 
As far as possible I will discover and understand it, 
and as far as I know it I will be it. This is the essen- 
tial disposition of my mind. God knows I have 
appetites and sloths and habits and blindnesses, 
but so far as it is in my power to release myself I 
will escape to this. ...” 

§3 

White sat far into the night and for several nights 
turning over papers and rummaging in untidy 
drawers. Memories came back to him of his dead 
friend and pieced themselves together with other 
memories and joined on to scraps in this writing. 
Bold yet convincing guesses began to leap across 
the gaps. A story shaped itself. . . . 

The story began with the schoolfellow he had 
known at Minchinghampton School. 

Benham had come up from his father’s prepara- 
tory school at Seagate. He had been a boy reserved 
rather than florid in his acts and manners, a boy with 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


11 


a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that 
went dark and deep with excitement. Several 
times White had seen him excited, and when he was 
excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things. 
On one occasion he had insisted upon walking across 
a field in which was an aggressive bull. It had been 
put there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to 
the swimming place. It had bellowed tremen- 
dously and finally charged him. He had dodged 
it and got away; at the time it had seemed an 
immense feat to White and the others who were 
safely up the field. He had walked to the fence, 
risking a second charge by his deliberation. Then 
he had sat on the fence and declared his intention 
of always crossing the field so long as the bull re- 
mained there. He had said this with white inten- 
sity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, 
and then suddenly he had dropped to the ground, 
clutched the fence, struggled with heaving shoulders, 
and been sick. 

The combination of apparently stout heart and 
manifestly weak stomach had exercised the Minch- 
inghampton intelligence profoundly. 

On one or two other occasions Benham had shown 
courage of the same rather screwed-up sort. He 
showed it not only in physical but in mental things. 
A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious dis- 
cussion in the school, and Benham, after some self- 
examination, professed an atheistical republicanism 
rather in the manner of Shelley. This brought him 
into open conflict with Roddies, the History Master. 


12 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Roddies had discovered these theological contro- 
versies in some mysterious way, and he took upon 
himself to talk at Benham and Prothero. He 
treated them to the common misapplication of that 
fool who “hath said in his heart there is no God.” 
He did not perceive there was any difference between 
the fool who says a thing in his heart and one who 
says it in the dormitory. He revived that delec- 
table anecdote of the Eton boy who professed dis- 
belief and was at once “ soundly flogged” by his head 
master. “Years afterwards that boy came back 
to thank ” 

‘ ‘ Gurr , ’ ’ said Prothero softly. ‘ ‘ Stew — ard ! ” 

“Your turn next, Benham,” whispered an ortho- 
dox controversialist. 

“Good Lord ! I’d like to see him,” said Benham 
with a forced loudness that could scarcely be ignored. 

The subsequent controversy led to an interview 
with the head. From it Benham emerged more 
whitely strung up than ever. “He said he would 
certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I 
would certainly kill him if he did.” 

“And then?” 

“He told me to go away and think it over. Said 
he would preach about it next Sunday. ... Well, 
a swishing isn’t a likely thing anyhow. But I 
would. . . . There isn’t a master here I’d stand 
a thrashing from — not one. . . . And because I 
choose to say what I think ! . . . I’d run amuck.” 

For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a 
vain and ill-concealed hope that the head might 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


13 


try it just to see if Benham would. It was tanta- 
lizingly within the bounds of possibility. . . . 

These incidents came back to White’s mind as he 
turned over the newspapers in the upper drawer of 
the bureau. The drawer was labelled “Fear — the 
First Limitation,” and the material in it was evi- 
dently designed for the opening volume of the great 
unfinished book. Indeed, a portion of it was already 
arranged and written up. 

As Wdiite read through this manuscript he was 
reminded of a score of schoolboy discussions Benham 
and he and Prothero had had together. Here was 
the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellec- 
tual hardihood, that had sometimes shocked his 
schoolfellows. Benham had been one of those boys 
who do not originate ideas very freely, but who go 
out to them with a fierce sincerity. He believed and 
disbelieved with emphasis. Prothero had first set 
him doubting, but it was Benham’s own tempera- 
ment took him on to denial. His youthful atheism 
had been a matter for secret consternation in White. 
White did not believe very much in God even then, 
but this positive disbelieving frightened him. It was 
going too far. There had been a terrible moment in 
the dormitory, during a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm 
so vehement that it had awakened them all, when 
Latham, the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had 
suddenly challenged Benham to deny his Maker. 

“Now say you don’t believe in God?” 

Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative 
faith, while little Hopkins, the Bishop’s son, being 


14 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


less certain about the accuracy of Providence than 
His aim, edged as far as he could away from 
Benham’s cubicle and rolled his head in his bed- 
clothes. 

“And anyhow/’ said Benham, when it was clear 
that he was not to be struck dead forthwith, “you 
show a poor idea of your God to think he’d kill a 
schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddies — ” 

“I can’t listen to you,” cried Latham the humour- 
ist, “I can’t listen to you. It’s — horrible .” 

“Well, who began it?” asked Benham. 

A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed 
him to White white-faced and ablaze with excite- 
ment, sitting up with the bed-clothes about him. 
“Oh wow!” wailed the muffled voice of little Hop- 
kins as the thunder burst like a giant pistol over- 
head, and he buried his head still deeper in the bed- 
clothes and gave way to unappeasable grief. 

Latham’s voice came out of the darkness. “This 
Atheism that you and Billy Prothero have brought 
into the school — ” 

He started violently at another vivid flashy 
and every one remained silent, waiting for the 
thunder. . . . 

But White remembered no more of the contro- 
versy because he had made a frightful discovery that 
filled and blocked his mind. Every time the light- 
ning flashed, there was a red light in Benham’s 
eyes. . . . 

It was only three days after when Prothero dis- 
covered exactly the same phenomenon in the School 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


15 


House boothole and talked of cats and cattle, that 
White's confidence in their friend was partially 
restored. . . . 

§4 

“Fear, the First Limitation" — his title indicated 
the spirit of Benham’s opening book very clearly. 
His struggle with fear was the very beginning of his 
soul’s history. It continued to the end. He had 
hardly decided to lead the noble life before he came 
bump against the fact that he was a physical coward. 
He felt fear acutely. “Fear," he wrote, “is the fore- 
most and most persistent of the shepherding powers 
that keep us in the safe fold, that drive us back to 
the beaten track and comfort and — futility. The 
beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of 
fear." 

At first the struggle was so great that he hated 
fear without any qualification ; he wanted to abol- 
ish it altogether. 

“When I was a boy," he writes, “I thought I 
would conquer fear for good and all, and never more 
be troubled by it. But it is not to be done in that 
way. One might as well dream of having dinner for 
the rest of one’s life. Each time and always I have 
found that it has to be conquered afresh. To this 
day I fear, little things as well as big things. I have 
to grapple with some little dread every day — urge 
myself. . . . Just as I have to wash and shave 
myself every day. ... I believe it is so with every 
one, but it is difficult to be sure ; few men who go 
into dangers care very much to talk about fear. ..." 


16 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came 
even to dealings with fear. He never, however, 
admits that this universal instinct is any better than 
a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose foster- 
ing restraints it is man’s duty to escape. Discretion, 
he declared, must remain ; a sense of proportion, 
an “ adequacy of enterprise,” but the discretion 
of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it 
has nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this; 
ebb in the nerves. “From top to bottom, the whole 
spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at one 
extremity down to that mere disinclination for 
enterprise, that reluctance and indolence which is 
its lowest phase. These are things of the beast, 
these are for creatures that have a settled environ- 
ment, a life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. 
But man is a beast of that kind no longer, he has 
left his habitat, he goes out to limitless living. ...” 

This idea of man going out into new things, leav- 
ing securities, habits, customs, leaving his normal 
life altogether behind him, underlay all Benham’s 
aristocratic conceptions. And it was natural that 
he should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, 
treat it indeed with ingratitude, and dwell upon the 
immense liberations that lie beyond for those who 
will force themselves through its remonstrances. . . . 

Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely 
in these notes. His fear of animals was ineradi- 
cable. He had had an overwhelming dread of bears 
until he was twelve or thirteen, the child’s irrational 
dread of impossible bears, bears lurking under the 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


17 


bed and in the evening shadows. He confesses that 
even up to manhood he could not cross a field 
containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon 
them — his bull adventure rather increased than 
diminished that disposition — he hated a strange 
dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as 
soon as possible out of reach of the teeth or heels of 
a horse. But the peculiar dread of his childhood 
was tigers. Some gaping nursemaid confronted 
him suddenly with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie 
annexe of a circus. “My small mind was over- 
whelmed.” 

“ I had never thought,” White read, “that a tiger 
was much larger than a St. Bernard dog. . . . 
This great creature ! . . . I could not believe any 
hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth 
and with weapons of enormous power. . . . 

“He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, 
rickety cage and looked over my head with yellow 
eyes — at some phantom far away. Every now and 
then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable 
indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul. 
I knew that were the cage to vanish I should stand 
there motionless, his helpless prey. I knew that 
were he at large in the same building with me I 
should be too terror-stricken to escape him. At 
the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should 
have awaited him paralyzed. At last I gripped my 
nurse’s hand. ‘Take me away,’ I whispered. 

“In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made 
my frozen flight from him, I slammed a door on him, 


18 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


and he thrust his paw through a panel as though it 
had been paper and clawed for me. The paw got 
longer and longer. . . . 

“I screamed so loudly that my father came up 
from his study. 

“I remember that he took me in his arms. 

“‘It’s only a big sort of pussy, Poff,’ he said. 

1 Felis tigris. Felis, you know, means cat/ 

“But I knew better. I was in no mood then for 
my father’s insatiable pedagoguery. 

“‘And my little son mustn’t be a coward.’ . . . 

“After that I understood I must keep silence 
and bear my tigers alone. 

“For years the thought of that tiger’s immensity 
haunted my mind. In my dreams I cowered be- 
fore it a thousand times ; in the dusk it rarely failed 
me. On the landing on my way to bed there was 
a patch of darkness beyond a chest that became a 
lurking horror for me, and sometimes the door of 
my father’s bedroom would stand open and there was 
a long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed 
an ottoman, but by night — . Could an ottoman 
crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle? 
Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so 
close that you could not even turn round upon it? 
No!” 

§ 5 

When Benham was already seventeen and, as he 
supposed, hardened against his fear of beasts, his 
friend Prothero gave him an account of the killing 
of an old labouring man by a stallion which had 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


19 


escaped out of its stable. The beast had careered 
across a field, leapt a hedge and come upon its vic- 
tim suddenly. He had run a few paces and stopped, 
trying to defend his head with the horse rearing over 
him. It beat him down with two swift blows of its 
fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow 
teeth and worried him as a terrier does a rat — the 
poor old wretch was still able to make a bleating 
sound at that — dropped him, trampled and kicked 
him as he tried to crawl away, and went on tram- 
pling and battering him until he was no more than 
a bloody inhuman bundle of clothes and mire. For 
more than half an hour this continued, and then its 
animal rage was exhausted and it desisted, and went 
and grazed at a little distance from this misshapen, 
hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant of a man. 
No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew 
what was happening. . . . 

This picture of human indignity tortured Ben- 
ham’s imagination much more than it tortured the 
teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and hor- 
ror. For three or four years every detail of that cir- 
cumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable. A little 
lapse from perfect health and the obsession returned. 
He could not endure the neighing of horses: when 
he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart 
stood still. And all his life thereafter he hated 
horses. 

§ 6 

A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted 
Benham was due to a certain clumsiness and insecur- 


20 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ity he felt in giddy and unstable places. There he 
was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly 
rash and the pitifully discreet. 

He had written an account of a private struggle 
between himself and a certain path of planks and 
rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This hap- 
pened in his adolescence. He had had a bad attack 
of influenza and his doctor had sent him to a little 
hotel — the only hotel it was in those days — at 
Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had 
picked up his strength, his father was to join him and 
take him mountaineering, that second-rate moun- 
taineering which is so dear to dons and school- 
masters. When the time came he was ready for 
that, but he had had his experiences. He had gone 
through a phase of real cowardice. He was afraid, 
he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he 
was afraid of the steepness of the mountains. He 
had to drive ten or twelve miles up and up the 
mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends 
and precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and 
ugly with a disposition to shy, and he confesses he 
clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated how 
he should jump if presently the whole turnout went 
tumbling over. . . . 

“And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. 
I made strides over precipices, I fell and fell with 
a floating swiftness towards remote valleys, I was 
assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crum- 
bled away and left me clinging by my nails to noth- 
ing." 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


21 


The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water- 
courses which bring water from some distant source 
to pastures that have an insufficient or uncertain 
supply. It is a little better known than most be- 
cause of a certain exceptional boldness in its con- 
struction ; for a distance of a few score yards it 
runs supported by iron staples across the front of a 
sheer precipice, and for perhaps half a mile it hangs 
like an eyebrow over nearly or quite vertical walls 
of pine-set rock. Beside it, on the outer side of it, 
runs a path, which becomes an offhand gangway of 
planking at the overhanging places. At one corner, 
which gives the favourite picture postcard from 
Montana, the rocks project so sharply above the 
water that the passenger on the gangway must 
crouch down upon the bending plank as he walks. 
There is no hand-hold at all. 

A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad 
spur and down a precipitous zig-zag upon the middle 
of the Bisse, and thither Benham came, fascinated 
by the very fact that here was something of which 
the mere report frightened him. He had to walk 
across the cold clear rush of the Bisse upon a pine 
log, and then he found himself upon one of the 
gentler interludes of the Bisse track. It was a 
scrambling path nearly two feet wide, and below it 
were slopes, but not so steep as to terrify. At a 
vast distance below he saw through tree-stems and 
blue haze a twisted strand of bright whiteness, the 
river that joins the Rhone at Sion. It looped about 
and passed out of sight remotely beneath his feet. 


22 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


He turned to the right, and came to a corner that 
overhung a precipice. He craned his head round 
this corner and saw the evil place of the picture-post- 
cards. 

He remained for a long time trying to screw 
himself up to walk along the jagged six-inch edge of 
rock between cliff and torrent into which the path 
has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the over- 
hanging rock beyond. 

He could not bring himself to do that. 

“It happened that close to the corner a large lump 
of rock and earth was breaking away, a cleft was 
opening, so that presently, it seemed possible at any 
moment, the mass would fall headlong into the 
blue deeps below. This impending avalanche was 
not in my path along the Bisse, it was no sort of 
danger to me, but in some way its insecurity gave a 
final touch to my cowardice. I could not get my- 
self round that corner.” 

He turned away. He went and examined the 
planks in the other direction, and these he found less 
forbidding. He crossed one precipitous place, with 
a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him, and found 
worse ahead. There also he managed. A third 
place was still more disagreeable. The plank was 
worn and thin, and sagged under him. He went 
along it supporting himself against the rock above 
the Bisse with an extended hand. Halfway the 
rock fell back, so that there was nothing whatever 
to hold. He stopped, hesitating whether he should 
go back — but on this plank there was no going 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


23 


back because no turning round seemed practicable. 
While he was still hesitating there came a helpful 
intervention. Behind him he saw a peasant appear- 
ing and disappearing behind trees and projecting 
rock masses, and coming across the previous plank 
at a vigorous trot. . . . 

Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got 
to the end of this third place without much 
trouble. Then very politely he stood aside for the 
expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his 
own pace. 

There were, however, more difficulties yet to 
come, and a disagreeable humiliation. That con- 
founded peasant developed a parental solicitude. 
After each crossing he waited, and presently began 
to offer advice and encouragement. At last came a 
place where everything was overhanging, where the 
Bisse was leaking, and the plank wet and slippery. 
The water ran out of the leak near the brim of the 
wooden channel and fell in a long shivering thread of 
silver. There was no sound of its fall. It just fell — 
into a void. Benham wished he had not noted that.- 
He groaned, but faced the plank; he knew this 
would be the slowest affair of all. 

The peasant surveyed him from the further side. 

“Don’t be afraid!” cried the peasant in his 
clumsy Valaisian French, and returned, returning 
along the plank that seemed quite sufficiently 
loaded without him, extending a charitable hand. 

“Damn!” whispered Benham, but he took the 
hand. 


24 


rHE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in 
his public-school French. “Pas de peur,” he said. 
“Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n’a pas hhabitude.” 

The peasant, failing to understand, assured him 
again that there was no danger. 

(“Damn!”) 

Benham was led over all the other planks, he was 
led as if he was an old lady crossing a glacier. He 
was led into absolute safety, and shamefacedly he 
rewarded his guide. Then he went a little way and 
sat down, swore softly, and watched the honest 
man go striding and plunging down towards Lens 
until he was out of sight. 

“Now,” said Benham to himself, “if I do not go 
back along the planks my secret honour is gone for 
ever.” 

He told himself that he had not a good head, that 
he was not well, that the sun was setting and the 
light no longer good, that he had a very good chance 
indeed of getting killed. Then it came to him sud- 
denly as a clear and simple truth, as something 
luminously plain, that it is better to get killed than 
go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as 
his. The change came into his mind as if a white 
light were suddenly turned on — where there had 
been nothing but shadows and darkness. He rose 
to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole 
way back, going with a kind of temperate reckless- 
ness, and, because he was no longer careful, easily. 
He went on beyond his starting place toward the 
corner, and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


25 


bit where the lump was falling aw T ay, and he had 
to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he recrossed the 
Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the 
pines to the crest, and returned through the meadows 
to his own hotel. 

After that he should have slept the sleep of con- 
tentment, but instead he had quite dreadful night- 
mares, of hanging in frozen fear above incredible 
declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slipper 
footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly 
in the middle and headed him down and down. . . . 

The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse 
again with those dreams like trailing mists in his 
mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse was 
nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it 
was an exercise for young ladies. . . . 

§ 7 

In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear 
as a shameful secret and as a thing to be got rid of 
altogether. It seemed to him that to feel fear was 
to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep 
dreads and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set 
about the business of its subjugation as if it were a 
spiritual amputation. But as he emerged from the 
egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this 
was too comprehensive an operation; every one 
feels fear, and your true aristocrat is not one who 
has eliminated, but one who controls or ignores it. 
Brave men are men who do things when they are 
afraid to do them, just as Nelson, even when he 


26 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


was seasick, and he was frequently seasick, was still 
master of the sea. Benham developed two leading 
ideas about fear; one that it is worse at the first 
onset, and far worse than any real experience, and the 
other that fear is essentially a social instinct. He set 
himself upon these lines to study — what can we 
call it ? — the taming of fear, the nature, care, and 
management of fear. . . . 

“Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deter- 
rent thing. It is superficial. Just as a man’s skin is 
infinitely more sensitive than anything inside. . . . 
Once you have forced yourself or have been forced 
through the outward fear into vivid action or experi- 
ence, you feel very little. The worst moment is 
before things happen. Rowe, the African sports- 
man, told me that he had seen cowardice often 
enough in the presence of lions, but he had never 
seen any one actually charged by a lion who did not 
behave well. I have heard the same thing of many 
sorts of dangers. 

“I began to suspect this first in the case of falling 
or jumping down. Giddiness may be an almost 
intolerable torture, and falling nothing of the sort. 
I once saw the face of an old man who had flung 
himself out of a high window in Rome, and who had 
been killed instantly on the pavement; it was not 
simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted. I suspect 
that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling 
may be delightful. Jumping down is, after all, 
only a steeper tobogganing, and tobogganing a milder 
jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


27 


of the Crest a run. I suffered sometimes almost 
intolerably; I found it almost impossible to get 
away. The first ten yards was like being slashed 
open with a sharp sword. But afterwards there was 
nothing but joyful thrills. All instinct, too, fought 
against me when I tried high diving. I managed it, 
and began to like it. I had to give it up because of 
my ears, but not until I had established the habit of 
stepping through that moment of disinclination. 

“I was Challoner’s passenger when he was killed at 
Sheerness. That was a queer unexpected experience, 
you may have supposed it an agony of terror, but 
indeed there was no fear in it at all. At any rate, I 
do not remember a moment of fear ; it has gone clean 
out of my memory if ever it was there. We were 
swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, 
in a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness. 
The river, with a string of battleships, was far away 
to the west of us, and the endless grey-blue flats of 
the Thames to the north. The sun was low behind a 
bank of cloud. I was watching a motor-car, which 
seemed to be crawling slowly enough, though, no 
doubt, it was making a respectable pace, between 
two hedges down below. It is extraordinary how 
slowly everything seems to be going when one sees 
it from such an height. 

“Then the left wing of the monoplane came up 
like a door that slams, some wires whistled past my 
head, and one whipped off my helmet, and then, with 
the seat slipping away from me, down we went. I 
snatched unavailingly for the helmet, and then 


28 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


gripped the sides. It was like dropping in a boat 
suddenly into the trough of a wave — and going 
on dropping. We were both strapped, and I got 
my feet against the side and clung to the locked 
second wheel. 

“The sensation was as though something like an 
intermittent electric current was pouring through 
me. It’s a ridiculous image to use, I can’t justify 
it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light 
squirted through every pore of my being. There 
was an astonishment, a feeling of confirmation. ‘ Of 
course these things do happen sometimes,’ I told 
myself. I don’t remember that Challoner looked 
round or said anything at all. I am not sure that 
I looked at him. . . . 

“There seemed to be a long interval of intensely 
excited curiosity, and I remember thinking, ‘Lord, 
but we shall come a smash in a minute ! ’ Far 
ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people 
strolling about apparently unaware of our disaster. 
There was a sudden silence as Challoner stopped the 
engine. . . . 

“But the point I want to insist upon is that I did 
not feel afraid. I was simply enormously, terribly 
interested. . . . 

“There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and 
we were both tipped forward, so that we were hanging 
forehead down by our straps, and it looked as if the 
sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky, 
then came another vast swerve, and we were falling 
sideways, sideways. . . . 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


29 


“I was altogether out of breath and 'physically 
astonished, and I remember noting quite intelli- 
gently as we hit the ground how the green grass 
had an effect of pouring out in every direction from 
below us. . . . 

“Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was 
flying up again. I was astonished by a tremendous 
popping — fabric, wires, everything seemed going pop, 
pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a flash 
of intense pain as my arm crumpled up. It was quite 
impersonal pain. As impersonal as seeing intense 
colour. Splinters ! I remember the word came into 
my head instantly. I remember that very definitely. 

“I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters. 
Or perhaps of the scraps and ends of rods and wires 
flying about us. It is curious that while I remember 
the word I cannot recall the idea. . . . 

“When I became conscious again the chief thing 
present in my mind was that all those fellows round 
were young soldiers who wouldn’t at all understand 
bad behaviour. My arm was — orchestral, but 
still far from being real suffering in me. Also I 
wanted to know what Challoner had got. They 
wouldn’t understand my questions, and then I 
twisted round and saw from the negligent way his 
feet came out from under the engine that he must be 
dead. And dark red stains with bright red froth — 

“Of course ! 

“There again the chief feeling was a sense of 
oddity. I wasn’t sorry for him any more than I 
was for myself. 


30 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, 
remarkable, vivid, but all right. . . .” 

§ 8 

“But though there is little or no fear in an aero- 
plane, even when it is smashing up, there is fear 
about aeroplanes. There is something that says 
very urgently, ‘ Don’t/ to the man who looks up 
into the sky. It is very interesting to note how 
at a place like Eastchurch or Rrooklands the neces- 
sary discretion trails the old visceral feeling with it, 
and how men will hang about, ready to go up, resolved 
to go up, but delaying. Men of indisputable courage 
will get into a state between dread and laziness, and 
waste whole hours of flying weather on any excuse or 
no excuse. Once they are up that inhibition vanishes. 
The man who was delaying and delaying half an hour 
ago will now be cutting the most venturesome capers 
in the air. Few men are in a hurry to get down 
again. I mean that quite apart from the hesitation 
of landing, they like being up there.” 

Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory. 

“Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it 
is not the ruler of experience. That is what I am 
driving at in all this. The bark of danger is worse 
than its bite. Inside the portals there may be 
events and destruction, but terror stays defeated 
at the door. It may be that when that old man 
was killed by a horse the child who watched suffered 
more than he did. . . . 

“I am sure that was so. . . ” 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


31 


§ 9 

As White read Benham’s notes and saw how his 
argument drove on, he was reminded again and 
again of those schoolboy days and Benham’s hardi- 
hood, and his own instinctive unreasonable reluc- 
tance to follow those gallant intellectual leads. 
If fear is an ancient instinctive boundary that the 
modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to ignore 
and transcend, may this not also be the case w T ith 
pain? We do a little adventure into the “life be- 
yond fear” ; may we not also think of adventuring 
into the life beyond pain? Is pain any saner a 
warning than fear? May not pain just as much as 
fear keep us from possible and splendid things? 
But why ask a question that is already answered in 
principle in every dentist’s chair? Benham’s idea, 
however, went much further than that, he was 
clearly suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured 
beyond a certain pitch, there might come pleasure 
again, an intensity of sensation that might have the 
colour of delight. He betrayed a real anxiety to 
demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness 
of a man who is sensible of dissentient elements 
within. He hated the thought of pain even more 
than he hated fear. His arguments did not in the 
least convince White, who stopped to poke the fire 
and assure himself of his own comfort in the midst 
of his reading. 

Young people and unseasoned people, Benham 
argued, are apt to imagine that if fear is increased 


32 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


and carried to an extreme pitch it becomes unbear- 
able, one will faint or die ; given a weak heart, a 
weak artery or any such structural defect and that 
may well happen, but it is just as possible that as 
the stimulation increases one passes through a brief 
ecstasy of terror to a new sane world, exalted but as 
sane as normal existence. There is the calmness 
of despair. Benham had made some notes to en- 
force this view, of the observed calm behaviour of 
men already hopelessly lost, men on sinking ships, 
men going to execution, men already maimed and 
awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part 
these were merely references to books and period- 
icals. In exactly the same way, he argued, we exag- 
gerate the range of pain as if it were limitless. We 
think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony 
and so beyond endurance to destruction. It proba- 
bly does nothing of the kind. Benham compared 
pain to the death range of the electric current. At a 
certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments 
and convulses, at a still greater it kills. But at 
enormous voltages, as Tesla was the first to demon- 
strate, it does no injury. And following on this 
came memoranda on the recorded behaviour of 
martyrs, on the self-torture of Hindoo ascetics, of the 
defiance of Red Indian prisoners. 

“ These things,” Benham had written, “are 
much more horrible when one considers them from 
the point of view of an easy-chair ” ; — White 
gave an assenting nod — 11 are they really horrible at 
all f Is it possible that these charred and slashed 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


33 


and splintered persons, those Indians hanging from 
hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had 
glimpses through great windows that were worth 
the price they paid for them? Haven’t we allowed 
those checks and barriers that are so important a 
restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into 
and distress and distort adult life? . . . 

“The modern world thinks too much as though 
painlessness and freedom from danger were ultimate 
ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled by the 
thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met 
except as well-guarded children meet these things, 
in exaggerated and untestable forms, in the mena- 
gerie or in nightmares. And so it thinks the dis- 
covery of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of 
civilization, and cosiness and innocent amusement, 
those ideals of the nursery, the whole purpose of 
mankind. . . 

“Mm,” said White, and pressed his lips together 
and knotted his brows and shook his head. 

§ 10 

But the bulk of Benham’s discussion of fear was 
not concerned with this perverse and overstrained 
suggestion of pleasure reached through torture, this 
exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at 
anything; it was an examination of the present 
range and use of fear that led gradually to something 
like a theory of control and discipline. The second 
of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an 
instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd 


34 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


there may be a collective panic, but that there is 
no real individual fear. Fear, Benham held, drives 
the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, 
the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the 
danger is pooled, then fear leaves us. He was quite 
prepared to meet the objection that animals of a 
solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear. Some 
of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discre- 
tion, and what is not discretion is the survival of an 
infantile characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger 
cub is certainly a social emotion, that drives it 
back to the other cubs, to its mother and the dark 
hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown tiger 
sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, 
that must be “ still reminiscent of the maternal lair.” 
But fear has very little hold upon the adult solitary 
animal, it changes with extreme readiness to resent- 
ment and rage. 

“Like most inexperienced people,” ran his notes, 
“I was astonished at the reported feats of men in 
war; I believed they were exaggerated, and that 
there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of 
silence about their real behaviour. But when on 
my way to visit India for the third time I turned off 
to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople, 
I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected 
conscripts will, every one of them, do things together 
that not one of them could by any means be induced 
to do alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that 
gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but 
I saw them exceeding orders ; I saw men leap out of 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


35 


cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot 
through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a 
number of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, 
several quite frightfully wounded, refuse chloroform 
merely to impress the English onlooker, some of their 
injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched 
a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on 
quite manifestly cheerful with men dropping out 
and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying 
still until every other man was down. ... Not 
one man would have gone up that hill alone, with- 
out onlookers. . . 

Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on 
one occasion in his life had he given way to ungovern- 
able fear, and that was when he was alone. Many 
times he had been in fearful situations in the face of 
charging lions and elephants, and once he had been 
bowled over and carried some distance by a lion, 
but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized 
him. There was no question of his general pluck. 
But on one occasion he was lost in rocky waterless 
country in Somaliland. He strayed out in the 
early morning while his camels were being loaded, 
followed some antelope too far, and lost his bearings. 
He looked up expecting to see the sun on his right 
hand and found it on his left. He became bewildered. 
He wandered some time and then fired three signal 
shots and got no reply. Then losing his head he 
began shouting. He had only four or five more 
cartridges and no water-bottle. His men were 
accustomed to his going on alone, and might not 


36 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


begin to remark upon his absence until sundown. . . . 
It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted 
the water-bottle he had left behind and organized 
a hunt for him. 

Long before they found him he had passed to an 
extremity of terror. The world had become hideous 
and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare, each 
rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful 
than the last, each new valley into which he looked 
more hateful and desolate, the cramped thorn bushes 
threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister 
lustre, and in every blue shadow about him the 
night and death lurked and waited. There was no 
hurry for them, presently they would spread out 
again and join and submerge him, presently in the 
confederated darkness he could be stalked and 
seized and slain. Yes, this he admitted was real 
fear. He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child 
yells. And then he had become afraid of his own 
voice. . . . 

“Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort 
in a crowd, in support and in a refuge, even when 
support or refuge is quite illusory, is just exactly 
what one would expect of fear if one believed it to 
be an instinct which has become a misfit. In the 
case of the soldier fear is so much a misfit that instead 
of saving him for the most part it destroys him. 
Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies 
fight in masses, men are mowed down in swathes, 
because only so is the courage of the common men 
sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


37 


out and handling their weapons as men of unqualified 
daring would handle them they would be infinitely 
safer and more effective. . . . 

“And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this 
misfit fear from a thousand bold successful gestures 
of mind and body, we are held back from the attain- 
ment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shel- 
ters that are perhaps in the end no better than 
traps. . . ” 

From such considerations Benham went on to 
speculate how far the crowd can be replaced in a 
man’s imagination, how far some substitute for that 
social backing can be made to serve the same purpose 
in neutralizing fear. ITe wrote with the calm of a 
man who weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and 
with the zeal of a man lost to every material con- 
sideration. His writing, it seemed to White, had 
something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, 
the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can 
no more banish fear from our being at present than 
we can carve out the fleshy pillars of the heart or 
the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep in our 
inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we 
have to satisfy hunger in order that it should leave 
us free, so we have to satisfy the unconquerable im- 
portunity of fear. We have to reassure our faltering 
instincts. There must be something to take the 
place of lair and familiars, something not ourselves 
but general, that we must carry with us into the 
lonely places. For it is true that man has now not 
only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a 


38 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in 
open order, to live in open order. . . . 

Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham 
had written, “This brings me to God.” 

“The devil it does!” said White, roused to a 
keener attention. 

“By no feat of intention can we achieve courage 
in loneliness so long as we feel indeed alone. An 
isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will 
always fail himself in the solitary place. There 
must be something more with us to sustain us against 
this vast universe than the spark of life that began 
yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. 
There can be no courage beyond social courage, the 
sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in 
us the sense of God. But God is a word that covers 
a multitude of meanings. When I was a boy I was 
a passionate atheist, I defied God, and so far as God 
is the mere sanction of social traditions and pressures, 
a mere dressing up of the crowd’s will in canonicals, 
I do still deny him and repudiate him. That God 
I heard of first from my nursemaid, and in very 
truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids of 
mankind. But there is another God than that God 
of obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, 
God who calls men from home and country, God 
scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a 
nail-pierced body out of death and came not to 
bring peace but a sword.” 

With something bordering upon intellectual con- 
sternation, WRite, who was a decent self-respecting 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


39 


sceptic, read these last clamberings of Benham’s 
spirit. They were written in pencil ; they were 
unfinished when he died. 

(Surely the man was not a Christian !) 

“You may be heedless of death and suffering 
because you think you cannot suffer and die, or 
you may be heedless of death and pain because you 
have identified your life with the honour of mankind 
and the insatiable adventurousness of man’s imagin- 
ation, so that the possible death is negligible and the 
possible achievement altogether outweighs it.” . . . 

White shook his head over these pencilled frag- 
ments. 

He was a member of the Rationalist Press Associa- 
tion, and he had always taken it for granted that 
Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this was 
hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff ; almost, it 
seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal. . . . 

§11 

One night when he was in India the spirit of adven- 
ture came upon Benham. He had gone with Kepple, 
of the forestry department, into the jungle country 
in the hills above the Tapti. He had been very 
anxious to see something of that aspect of Indian 
life, and he had snatched at the chance Kepple had 
given him. But they had scarcely started before 
the expedition was brought to an end by an accident, 
Kepple was thrown by a pony and his ankle broken. 
He and Benham bandaged it as well as they could, 
and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had 


40 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


to wait in the camp that was to have been the centre 
of their jungle raids. The second day of this waiting 
was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered 
much from the pressure of this amateurish bandag- 
ing. In the evening Benham got cool water from 
the well and rearranged things better ; the two men 
dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath 
the big banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his 
day of pain, was carried to his tent. Presently he 
fell asleep and Benham was left to himself. 

Now that the heat was over he found himself 
quite indisposed to sleep. He felt full of life and 
anxious for happenings. 

He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead 
beneath the banyan, that Kepple had lain upon 
through the day, and he watched the soft immensity 
of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering 
colours of the world. It left the outlines, it obliter- 
ated nothing, but it stripped off the superficial 
reality of things. The moon was full and high 
overhead, and the light had not so much gone as 
changed from definition and the blazing glitter and 
reflections of solidity to a translucent and unsub- 
stantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the 
little encampment north, south, and west seemed 
to have crept a little nearer, enriched itself with 
blackness, taken to itself voices. 

(Surely it had been silent during the day.) 

A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the 
dead grass and the leaves. In the day the air had 
been still. 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


41 


Immediately after the sunset there had been a 
great crying of peacocks in the distance, but that 
was over now; the crickets, however, were still 
noisy, and a persistent sound had become predomi- 
nant, an industrious unmistakable sound, a sound 
that took his mind back to England, in midsummer. 
It was like a watchman’s rattle — a nightjar ! 

So there were nightjars here in India, too ! One 
might have expected something less familiar. And 
then came another cry from far away over the heat- 
stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It • was 
repeated. Was that perhaps some craving leopard, 
a tiger cat, a panther ? — 

“Hunt, Hunt ” ; that might be a deer. 

Then suddenly an angry chattering came from 
the dark trees quite close at hand. A monkey ? . . . 

These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements 
through the air were bats. . . . 

Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. 
This was its waking hour. Now the deer were 
arising from their forms, the bears creeping out of 
their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down 
the gullies, the tigers and panthers and jungle cats 
stalking noiselessly from their lairs in the grass. 
Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat 
and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and 
alertly intent upon their purposes, grazed or sought 
water, flitting delicately through the moonlight 
and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again 
Benham heard that sound like the belling of a 
stag. . . . 


42 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, 
into which man did not go. Here he was on the 
verge of a world that for all the stuffed trophies of 
the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist 
is still almost as unknown as if it was upon another 
planet. What intruders men are, what foreigners 
in the life of this ancient system! 

He looked over his shoulder, and there were the 
two little tents, one that sheltered Kepple and one 
that awaited him, and beyond, in an irregular line, 
glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or 
two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there 
was a voice — low, monotonous — it must have 
been telling a tale. Further, sighing and stirring 
ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a 
great pale space of moonlight and the clumsy out- 
lines of the village well. The clustering village itself 
slept in darkness beyond the mango trees, and still 
remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One 
might have fancied this was the encampment of 
newly-come invaders, were it not for the larger 
villages that are overgrown with thickets and alto- 
gether swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for 
the deserted temples that are found rent asunder by 
the roots of trees and the ancient embankments that 
hold water only for the drinking of the sambur 
deer. . . . 

Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again. . . . 

He had come far out of his way to visit this strange 
world of the ancient life, that now recedes and dwin- 
dles before our new civilization, that sterns fated 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


43 


to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry 
advance of physical science and material organiza- 
tion. He was full of unsatisfied curiosities about 
its fierce hungers and passions, its fears and cruelties, 
its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable 
and yet most precious understandings. He had 
long ceased to believe that the wild beast is wholly 
evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for 
men. ... 

Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysteri- 
ous jungle life than he was now. 

It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so 
close at hand and so inaccessible. . . . 

As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment 
the moon, swimming on through the still circle of the 
hours, passed slowly over him. The lights and 
shadows about him changed by imperceptible grada- 
tions and a long pale alley where the native cart 
track drove into the forest, opened slowly out of 
the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened. 
It opened out to him with a quality of invita- 
tion. . . . 

There was the jungle before him. Was it after all 
so inaccessible ? 

“Come !” the road said to him. 

Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the 
moonlight and stood motionless. 

Was he afraid ? 

Even now some hungry watchful monster might 
lurk in yonder shadows, watching with infinite 
still patience. Kepple had told him how they would 


44 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


sit still for hours — staring unblinkingly as cats 
stare at a fire — and then crouch to advance. 
Beneath the shrill overtone of the nightjars, what 
noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and 
cracklings and creepings might there not be? . . . 

Was he afraid? 

That question determined him to go. 

He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A 
stick? A gun, he knew, was a dangerous thing to 
an inexperienced man. No ! He would go now, 
even as he was with empty hands. At least he 
would go as far as the end of that band of moonlight. 
If for no other reason than because he was afraid. 
Now ! 

For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet 
were too heavy to lift and then, hands in pockets, 
khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he strolled 
towards the cart-track. 

Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard 
the distant fires of the men. No one would miss 
him. They would think he was in his tent. He 
faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track 
was a rutted path of soft, warm sand, on which he 
went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled for an 
instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like 
a flake of moonlight across the track and vanished 
without a sound among the trees. 

Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when 
he passed near trees his footsteps became noisy 
with the rustle and crash of dead leaves. The 
jungle was full of moonlight ; twigs, branches, 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


45 

creepers, grass-clumps came out acutely vivid. 
The trees and bushes stood in pools of darkness, 
and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine 
and big rocks shining with an unearthly lustre. 
Things seemed to be clear and yet uncertain. It 
was as if they dissolved or retired a little and then 
returned to solidity. 

A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black 
across the great stars soared a flying squirrel and 
caught a twig, and ran for shelter. A second 
hesitated in a tree-top and pursued. They chased 
each other and vanished abruptly. He forgot his 
sense of insecurity in the interest of these active, 
little silhouettes. And he noted how much biggeJ 
and more wonderful the stars can look when one 
sees them through interlacing branches. 

Ahead was darkness, but not so dark when he 
came to it that the track was invisible. He was at 
the limit of his intention, but now he saw that that 
had been a childish project. He would go on, he 
would walk right into the jungle. His first disinclina- 
tion was conquered, and the soft intoxication of the 
subtropical moonshine was in his blood. . . . But 
he wished he could walk as a spirit walks, without 
this noise of leaves. . . . 

Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and 
there must always be jungles for men to walk in. 
Always there must be jungles. . . . 

Some small beast snarled and bolted from under 
his feet. He stopped sharply. He had come into 
a darkness under great boughs, and now he stood 


46 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


still as the little creature scuttled away. Beyond 
the track emerged into a dazzling whiteness. . . . 

In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again 
in the distance, and then came a fuss of monkeys 
in a group of trees near at hand. He remained 
still until this had died away into mutterings. 

Then on the verge of movement he was startled by 
a ripe mango that slipped from its stalk and fell 
out of the tree and struck his hand. It took a little 
time to understand that, and then he laughed, and 
his muscles relaxed, and he went on again. 

A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself. 

He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a 
great shield of light spread out above him. All the 
world seemed swimming in its radiance. The 
stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue. 

The track led him on across white open spaces 
of shrivelled grass and sand, amidst trees where 
shadows made black patternings upon the silver, and 
then it plunged into obscurities. For a time it 
lifted, and then on one hand the bush fell away, 
and he saw across a vast moonlit valley wide undula- 
tions of open cultivation, belts of jungle, copses, and 
a great lake as black as ebony. For a time the path 
ran thus open, and then the jungle closed in again 
and there were more thickets, more levels of grass, 
and in one place far overhead among the branches 
he heard and stood for a time perplexed at a vast 
deep humming of bees. . . . 

Presently a black monster with a hunched back 
went across his path heedless of him and making a 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


47 


great noise in the leaves. He stood quite still until 
it had gone. He could not tell whether it was a 
boar or hyaena ; most probably, he thought, a boar 
because of the heaviness of its rush. 

The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a 
ravine, ascended. He passed a great leafless tree on 
which there were white flowers. On the ground 
also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these 
flowers ; they were dropping noiselessly, and since 
they were visible in the shadows, it seemed to him 
that they must be phosphorescent. And they 
emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart 
the path. Presently he passed another such tree. 
Then he became aware of a tumult ahead of him, 
a smashing of leaves, a snorting and slobbering, 
grunting and sucking, a whole series of bestial sounds. 
He halted for a little while, and then drew nearer, 
picking his steps to avoid too great a noise. Here 
were more of those white-blossomed trees, and be- 
neath, in the darkness, something very black and 
big was going to and fro, eating greedily. Then he 
found that there were two and then more of these 
black things, three or four of them. 

Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly. 

Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, 
startlingly big, a huge, black hairy monster with a 
long white nose on a grotesque face, and he was 
stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth with 
his curved fore claws. He took not the slightest 
notice of the still man, who stood perhaps twenty 
yards away from him. He was too blind and care- 


48 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


lees. He snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, 
and plunged into the shadows again. Benham 
heard him root among the leaves and grunt apprecia- 
tively. The air was heavy with the reek of the 
crushed flowers. 

For some time Benham remained listening to and 
peering at these preoccupied gluttons. At last he 
shrugged his shoulders, and left them and went on 
his way. For a long time he could hear them, then 
just as he was on the verge of forgetting them alto- 
gether, some dispute arose among them, and there 
began a vast uproar, squeals, protests, comments, 
one voice ridiculously replete and authoritative, 
ridiculously suggestive of a drunken judge with his 
mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance high above 
the others. . . . 

The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost 
abruptly, and left the jungle to the incessant night- 
jars. . . . 

For what end was this life of the jungle? 

All BenhanTs senses were alert to the sounds and 
appearances about him, and at the same time his 
mind was busy with the perplexities of that riddle. 
Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man 
must drain and clear away? Or is it to have a 
use in the greater life of our race that now begins? 
Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice, 
for the sake of his manhood? Will he preserve 
it? 

Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. 
Will the jungle keep him fierce? 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


49 


For life, thought Benham, there must be in- 
security. . . . 

He had missed the track. . . . 

He was now in a second ravine. He was going 
downward, walking on silvery sand amidst great 
boulders, and now there was a new sound in the 
air — . It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was 
a solitary gleam. He was approaching a jungle 
pool 

Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic up- 
roar. 11 Honk!" cried a great voice, and “Honk!” 
There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush — a rush 
as it seemed towards him. Was he being charged? 
He backed against a rock. A great pale shape 
leaped by him, an antlered shape. It was a herd 
of big deer bolting suddenly out of the stillness. 
He heard the swish and smash of their retreat grow 
distant, disperse. He remained standing with his 
back to the rock. 

Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and 
goat-suckers resumed possession of his consciousness. 
But now some primitive instinct perhaps or some 
subconscious intimation of danger made him meticu- 
lously noiseless. 

He went on down a winding sound-deadening path 
of sand towards the drinking-place. He came to a 
wide white place that was almost level, and beyond 
it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the 
mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and 
black, a dog-like beast sat on its tail in the midst 
of this space, started convulsively and went slinking 


50 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


into the undergrowth. Benham paused for a mo- 
ment and then walked out softly into the light, and, 
behold ! as if it were to meet him, came a monster, 
a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the 
blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been 
instantly changed to stone. 

It had stopped with one paw advanced. Its 
striped mask was light and dark grey in the moon- 
light, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its 
mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of 
viscous saliva shone vivid. Its great round- 
pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly. At last 
the nightmare of Benham’ s childhood had come 
true, and he was face to face with a tiger, uncaged, 
uncontrolled. 

For some moments neither moved, neither the 
beast nor the man. They stood face to face, each 
perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless and 
soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes 
all things like a dream. 

Benham stood quite motionless, and body and 
mind had halted together. That confrontation had 
an interminableness that had nothing to do with the 
actual passage of time. Then some trickle of his 
previous thoughts stirred in the frozen quiet of his 
mind. 

He spoke hoarsely. “I am Man,” he said, and 
lifted a hand as he spoke. “The Thought of the 
world.” 

His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved. 
But the great beast went sideways, gardant, only 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


51 


that its head was low, three noiseless instantaneous 
strides it made, and stood again watching him. 

“Man,” he said, in a voice that had no sound, and 
took a step forward. 

‘ ‘ W ough ! ’ ’ With two bounds the monster had be- 
come a great grey streak that crackled and rustled in 
the shadows of the trees. And then it had vanished, 
become invisible and inaudible with a kind of instan- 
taneousness. 

For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood 
rigid, fearlessly expectant, and then far away up the 
ravine he heard the deer repeat their cry of alarm, 
and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger 
had passed among them and was gone. . . . 

He walked on towards the deserted tank and now 
he was talking aloud. 

“I understand the jungle. I understand. ... If 
a few men die here, what matter? There are worse 
deaths than being killed. . . . 

“What is this fool's trap of security? 

“Every time in my life that I have fled from se- 
curity I have fled from death. . . . 

“Let men stew in their cities if they will. It is in 
the lonely places, in jungles and mountains, in snows 
and fires, in the still observatories and the silent 
laboratories, in those secret and dangerous places 
where life probes into life, it is there that the masters 
of the world, theTords of the beast, the rebel sons of 
Fate come to their own. . . . 

“You sleeping away there in the cities ! Do you 
know what it means for you that I am here to-night ? 


52 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“Do you know what it 'means to you? 

“I am just one — just the precursor. 

“Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities 
must be burnt about you. You must come out of 
them. . . .” 

He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they 
came to him, and he saw no more living creatures 
because they fled and hid before the sound of his 
voice. He wandered until the moon, larger now and 
yellow tinged, was low between the black bars of the 
tree stems. And then it sank very suddenly behind 
a hilly spur and the light failed swiftly. 

He stumbled and went with difficulty. He could 
go no further among these rocks and ravines, and he 
sat down at the foot of a tree to wait for day. 

He sat very still indeed. 

A great stillness came over the world, a velvet 
silence that wrapped about him, as the velvet 
shadows wrapped about him. The corncrakes had 
ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died 
away, the breeze had fallen. A drowsing comfort 
took possession of him. He grew more placid and 
more placid still. He was enormously content to 
find that fear had fled before him and was gone. 
He drifted into that state of mind when one thinks 
without ideas, when one’s mind is like a starless 
sky, serene and empty. 


§12 


Some hours later Benham found that the trees 
and rocks were growing visible again, and he saw a 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


53 


very bright star that he knew must be Lucifer 
rising amidst the black branches. He was sit- 
ting upon a rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed 
leafless tree. He had been asleep, and it was 
daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and colour- 
less. 

He must have slept soundly. 

He heard a cock crow, and another answer — 
jungle fowl these must be, because there could 
be no village within earshot — and then far away 
and bringing back memories of terraced houses 
and ripe walled gardens, was the scream of pea- 
cocks. And some invisible bird was making a 
hollow beating sound among the trees near at hand. 
Tunk. . . . Tunk , and out of the dry grass came a 
twittering. 

There was a green light in the east that grew 
stronger, and the stars after their magnitudes were 
dissolving in the blue ; only a few remained faintly 
visible. The sound of birds increased. Through 
the trees he saw towering up a great mauve thing 
like the back of a monster, — but that was nonsense, 
it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods 
of teak. 

He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered 
whether he had dreamed of a tiger. 

He tried to remember and retrace the course of his 
over-night wanderings. 

A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming 
through the trees, and then far away uphill he heard 
the creaking of a cart. 


54 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


He followed the hint of a footmark, and went 
back up the glen slowly and thoughtfully. 

Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of 
trees, a sheet of water, and the ruins of an old 
embankment. It was the ancient tank of his over- 
night encounter. The pool of his dream ? 

With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its 
margin to the sandy level beyond, and cast about 
and sought intently, and at last found, and then 
found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several 
sorts of deer and the footprints of many biggish 
birds, first the great spoor of the tiger and then his 
own. Here the beast had halted, and here it had 
leapt aside. Here his own footmarks stopped. 
Here his heels had come together. 

It had been no dream. 

There was a white mist upon the water of the 
old tank like the bloom upon a plum, and the trees 
about it seemed smaller and the sand-space wider 
and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine. 
Then the ground had looked like a floor of frosted silver. 

And thence he went on upward through the fresh 
morning, until just as the east grew red with sun- 
rise, he reached the cart-track from which he had 
strayed overnight. It was, he found, a longer 
way back to the camp than he remembered it to be. 
Perhaps he had struck the path further along. It 
curved about and went up and down and crossed 
three ravines. At last he came to that trampled 
place of littered white blossom under great trees 
where he had seen the bears. 


ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY 


55 


The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden 
spears, and his shadow, that was at first limitless, 
crept towards his feet. The dew had gone from 
the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots 
before he came back into the open space about the 
great banyan and the tents. And Kepple, refreshed 
by a night’s rest and coffee, was wondering loudly 
where the devil he had gone. 




THE STORY 









CHAPTER THE FIRST 
The Boy Grows Up 
§1 

Benham was the son of a schoolmaster. His 
father was assistant first at Cheltenham, and sub- 
sequently at Minchinghampton, and then he be- 
came head and later on sole proprietor of Martin- 
dale House, a high-class preparatory school at 
Seagate. He was extremely successful for some 
years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, 
and then disaster overtook him in the shape of a 
divorce. His wife, William Porphyry’s mother, 
made the acquaintance of a rich young man named 
Nolan, who was recuperating at Seagate from the 
sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a gun accident 
in Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was 
divorced. She was, however, unable to marry him 
because he died at Wiesbaden only three days after 
the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree 
absolute. Instead, therefore, being a woman of 
great spirit, enterprise and sweetness, she married 
Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey Marayne, 
the great London surgeon. 

Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and senti- 
mental young man, and he left about a third of his 
59 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


CO 

very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham and the 
rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed him- 
self to have injured. With this and a husband 
already distinguished, she returned presently to 
London, and was on the whole fairly well received 
there. 

It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate 
that the brunt of this divorce fell. There is perhaps 
a certain injustice in the fact that a schoolmaster 
who has lost his wife should also lose the more valu- 
able proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought 
in England is against any association of a school- 
master with matrimonial irregularity. And also 
Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have 
been better for him if he could have produced a sister. 
His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it 
only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could 
now only appeal to the broader-minded, more pro- 
gressive type of parent, he became an educational 
reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curric- 
ulum with increasing frequency to the Times. He 
expended a considerable fraction of his dwindling 
capital upon a science laboratory and a fives court ; 
he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teach- 
ing Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about 
a thousand volumes, including the Hundred Best 
Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury, to the 
school equipment. None of these things did any- 
thing but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife’s 
escapade had created in the limited opulent and 
discreet class to which his establishment appealed. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


61 


One boy who, under the influence of the Hundred 
Best Books, had quoted the Zend-Avesta to an iras- 
cible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn 
without notice or compensation in the middle of the 
term. It intensifies the tragedy of the Reverend 
Harold Benham’s failure that in no essential respect 
did his school depart from the pattern of all other 
properly-conducted preparatory schools. 

In appearance he was near the average of scho- 
lastic English gentlemen. He displayed a manifest 
handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and 
disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high fore- 
head. His rather tired brown eyes were magnified 
by glasses. He was an active man in unimportant 
things, with a love for the phrase “ ship-shape / 7 
and he played cricket better than any one else on 
the staff. He walked in wide strides, and would 
sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard. 
Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had 
early distrusted his natural impulse in conversation, 
and had adopted the defensive precaution of a rather 
formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made 
a part of him. His general effect was of one who is 
earnestly keeping up things that might otherwise 
give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping 
up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school 
that was only too manifestly attenuated, keeping 
up a pretentious economy of administration in a 
school that must not be too manifestly impoverished, 
keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and 
rather a flutterer of dovecots — with its method of 


62 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


manual training for example — keeping up esprit de 
corps and the manliness of himself and every one 
about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful 
second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and 
indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse 
and insubordination away there in London, who had 
once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty. 
“ After my visits to her,” wrote Benham, “he would 
show by a hundred little expressions and poses and 
acts how intensely he wasn’t noting that anything 
of the sort had occurred.” 

But one thing that from the outset the father 
seemed to have failed to keep up thoroughly was 
his intention to mould and dominate his son. 

The advent of his boy had been a tremendous 
event in the reverend gentleman’s life. It is not 
improbable that his disposition to monopolize the 
pride of this event contributed to the ultimate dis- 
ruption of his family. It left so few initiatives 
within the home to his wife. He had been an early 
victim to that wave of philoprogenitive and educa- 
tional enthusiasm which distinguished the closing 
decade of the nineteenth century. He was full of 
plans in those days for the education of his boy, 
and the thought of the youngster played a large 
part in the series of complicated emotional crises 
with which he celebrated the departure of his wife, 
crises in which a number of old school and college 
friends very generously assisted — spending week- 
ends at Seagate for this purpose, and mingling to- 
bacco, impassioned handclasps and suchlike consola- 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


63 


tion with much patient sympathetic listening to his 
carefully balanced analysis of his feelings. He de- 
clared that his son was now his one living purpose in 
life, and he sketched out a scheme of moral and intel- 
lectual training that he subsequently embodied in 
five very stimulating and intimate articles for the 
School World, but never put into more than partial 
operation. 

“I have read my father’s articles upon this sub- 
ject,” wrote Benham, “and I am still perplexed to 
measure just what I owe to him. Did he ever 
attempt this moral training he contemplated so 
freely ? I don’t think he did. I know now, I knew 
then, that he had something in his mind. . . . 
There were one or two special walks we had together, 
he invited me to accompany him with a certain 
portentousness, and we would go out pregnantly 
making superficial remarks about the school cricket 
and return, discussing botany, with nothing said. 

“His heart failed him. 

“Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out 
at me from the school pulpit. 

“I think that my father did manage to convey 
to me his belief that there were these fine things, 
honour, high aims, nobilities. If I did not get this 
belief from him then I do not know how I got it. 
But it was as if he hinted at a treasure that had got 
very dusty in an attic, a treasure which he hadn’t 
himself been able to spend. ...” 

The father who had intended to mould his son 
ended by watching him grow, not always with sym- 


64 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


pathy or understanding. He was an overworked 
man assailed by many futile anxieties. One sees 
him striding about the establishment with his gown 
streaming out behind him urging on the groundsman 
or the gardener, or dignified, expounding the par- 
ticular advantages of Seagate to enquiring parents, 
one sees him unnaturally cheerful and facetious at 
the midday dinner table, one imagines him keeping 
up high aspirations in a rather too hastily scribbled 
sermon in the school pulpit, or keeping up an enthu- 
siasm for beautiful language in a badly-prepared 
lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation 
and unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, 
and one realizes his disadvantage against the quiet 
youngster whose retentive memory was storing up 
all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and 
one understands, too, a certain relief that mingled 
with his undeniable emotion when at last the time 
came for young Benham, “the one living purpose” 
of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the 
next step in the mysterious ascent of the English 
educational system. 

Three times at least, and with an increased inter- 
val, the father wrote fine fatherly letters that would 
have stood the test of publication. Then his com- 
munications became comparatively hurried and 
matter-of-fact. His boy’s return home for the holi- 
days was always rather a stirring time for his pri- 
vate feelings, but he became more and more inexpres- 
sive. He would sometimes lay a hand on those 
growing shoulders and then withdraw it. They 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


65 


felt braced-up shoulders, stiffly inflexible or — they 
would wince. And when one has let the habit of 
indefinite feelings grow upon one, what is there left 
to say ? If one did say anything one might be asked 
questions. . . . 

One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad 
together. The last of these occasions followed Ben- 
ham’s convalescence at Montana and his struggle 
with the Bisse ; the two went to Zermatt and did sev- 
eral peaks and crossed the Theodule, and it was 
clear that their joint expeditions were a strain upon 
both of them. The father thought the son reck- 
less, unskilful, and impatient ; the son found the 
father’s insistence upon guides, ropes, precautions, 
the recognized way, the highest point and back 
again before you get a chill, and talk about it sagely 
but very, very modestly over pipes, tiresome. He 
wanted to wander in deserts of ice and see over the 
mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted 
on a precipice. And gradually he was becoming 
familiar with his father’s repertory of Greek quota- 
tions. There was no breach between them, but 
each knew that holiday was the last they would ever 
spend together. . . . 

The court had given the custody of young William 
Porphyry into his father’s hands, but by a generous 
concession it was arranged that his mother should 
have him to see her for an hour or so five times a 
year. The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the 
top of this, introduced a peculiar complication that 
provided much work for tactful intermediaries, and 


66 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


gave great and increasing scope for painful delicacies 
on the part of Mr. Benham &s the boy grew up. 

“I see,” said the father over his study pipe and 
with his glasses fixed on remote distances above the 
head of the current sympathizer, “I see more and 
more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet 
at an end. ... In many respects he is like her. 
. . . Quick. Too quick. ... He must choose. 
But I know his choice. Yes, yes, — I’m not blind. 
She’s worked upon him. ... I have done T^hat I 
could to bring out the manhood in him. Perhaps 
it will bear the strain. ... It will be a wrench, 
old man — God knows.” 

He did his very best to make it a wrench. 

§2 

Benham’s mother, whom he saw quarterly and 
also on the first of May, because it was her birth- 
day, touched and coloured his imagination far more 
than his father did. She was now Lady Marayne, 
and a prominent, successful, and happy little lady. 
Her dereliction had been forgiven quite soon, and 
whatever whisper of it remained was very com- 
pletely forgotten during the brief period of moral 
kindliness which followed the accession of King Ed- 
ward the Seventh. It no doubt contributed to her 
social reinstatement that her former husband was 
entirely devoid of social importance, while, on the 
other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne’s temporary mo- 
nopoly of the csecal operation which became so fash- 
ionable in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


67 


as to be practically epidemic, created a strong feel- 
ing in her favour. 

She was blue-eyed and very delicately complex- 
ioned, quick-moving, witty, given to little storms 
of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things, 
brave things, successful things, and the respect and 
affection of all the world. She did quite what she 
liked upon impulse, and nobody ever thought ill 
of her. 

Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good 
west-ccfuntry people. She had broken away from 
them before she was twenty to marry Benham, 
whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had 
talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, 
the noblest work in the world, him at his daily divine 
toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe 
of Blessed Boys — all of good family, some of quite 
the best. For a time she had kept it up even more 
than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her with 
a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends 
of the earth. She became sick with desire for the 
forests of Brazil, and the Pacific, and — a peak in 
Darien. Immediately the school was frowsty be- 
yond endurance, and for the first time she let herself 
perceive how dreadfully a gentleman and a scholar 
can smell of pipes and tobacco. Only one course 
lay open to a,, woman of spirit. . . . 

For a year she did indeed live like a woman of 
spirit, and it was at Nolan’s bedside that Marayne 
was first moved to admiration. She was plucky. 
All men love a plucky woman. 


68 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of anti- 
septic soap, but he talked in a way that amused her, 'j 
and he trusted as well as adored her. She did what 
she liked with his money, her own money, and her 
son’s trust money, and she did very well. From the 
earliest Benham’s visits were to a gracious presence 
amidst wealthy surroundings. The transit from the 
moral blamelessness of Seagate had an entirely mis- 
leading effect of ascent. 

Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his 
memory; they occurred at various hotels in Sea- 
gate. Afterwards he would go, first taken by a 
governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross, 
where he would be met, in earlier times by a mafd 
and afterwards by a deferential manservant who 
called him “Sir,” and conveyed, sometimes in av 
hansom cab and later in a smart brougham, by 
Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, 
and streets of increasing wealth and sublimity to 
Sir Godfrey’s house in Desborough Street. Very 
naturally he fell into thinking of these discreet 
and well-governed West End streets as a part of 
his mother’s atmosphere. 

The house had a dignified portico, and always 
before he had got down to the pavement the door 
opened agreeably and a second respectful manser- 
vant stood ready. Then came the large hall, with 
its noiseless carpets and great Chinese jars, its lac- 
quered cabinets and the wide staircase’ and floating 
down the wide staircase, impatient to greet him, 
light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and wel- 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


69 


coming, radiating a joyfulness as cool and clear as 
a dewy morning, came his mother. “Well, little 
man, my son/’ she would cry in her happy singing 
voice, “ Well ?” 

So he thought she must always be, but indeed 
these meetings meant very much to her, she dressed 
for them and staged them, she perceived the bright 
advantages of her rarity and she was quite deter- 
mined to have her son when the time came to pos- 
sess him. She kissed him but not oppressively, 
she caressed him cleverly; it w r as only on these 
rare occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed, 
and she talked to his shy boyishness until it felt a 
more spirited variety of manhood. “What have 
you been doing ?” she asked, “since I saw you last.” 

She never said he had grown, but she told him he 
looked tall ; and though the tea was a marvellous 
display it was never an obtrusive tea, it wasn’t poked 
at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well within 
reach of one’s arm, like an agreeable accompaniment 
to their conversation. 

“What have you done? All sorts of brave 
things? Do you swim now? I can swim. Oh! 
I can swim half a mile. Some day we will swim 
races together. Why not? And you ride? . . . 

“The horse bolted — and you stuck on? Did 
you squeak ? I stick on, but I have to squeak. But 
you — of course, No ! you mustn’t. I’m just a little 
woman. And I ride big horses. . . 

And for the end she had invented a characteristic 
little ceremony. 


70 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


She would stand up in front of him and put her 
hands on his shoulders and look into his face. 

“ Clean eyes?” she would say. “ — still?” 

Then she would take his ears in her little firm 
hands and kiss very methodically his eyes and his 
forehead and his cheeks and at last his lips. Her 
own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears. 

“Go,” she would say. 

That was the end. 

It seemed to Benham as though he was being let 
down out of a sunlit fairyland to this grey world 
again. 

§3 

The contrast between Lady Marayne’s pretty 
amenities and the good woman at Seagate who urged 
herself almost hourly to forget that William Por- 
phyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. 
The second Mrs. Benham’s conscientious spirit and 
a certain handsome ability about her fitted her far 
more than her predecessor for the onerous duties 
of a schoolmaster’s wife, but whatever natural buoy- 
ancy she possessed was outweighed by an irre- 
pressible conviction derived from an episcopal grand- 
parent that the remarriage of divorced persons is 
sinful, and by a secret but well-founded doubt 
whether her husband loved her with a truly romantic 
passion. She might perhaps have borne either of 
these troubles singly, but the two crushed her spirit. 

Her temperament was not one that goes out to 
meet happiness. She had reluctant affections and 
suspected rather than welcomed the facility of other 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


71 


people’s. Her susceptibility to disagreeable impres- 
sions was however very ample, and life was fenced 
about with protections for her “ feelings.” It filled 
young Benham with inexpressible indignations that 
his sweet own mother, so gay, so brightly cheerful 
that even her tears were stars, was never to be men- 
tioned in his stepmother’s presence, and it was not 
until he had fully come to years of reflection that he 
began to realize with what honesty, kindness and 
patience this naturally not very happy lady had 
nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered 
him. 

§4 

As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself 
with pride, his mother’s affection for him blossomed 
into a passion. She made him come down to Lon- 
don from Cambridge as often as she could ; she went 
about with him ; she made him squire her to thea- 
tres and take her out to dinners and sup with her 
at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with 
her at Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house 
Sir Godfrey had given her. And always when they 
parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were 
still clean — whatever she meant by that — and she 
Idssed his forehead and cheeks and eyes and lips. 
She began to make schemes for his career, she con- 
trived introductions she judged would be useful to 
him later. 

Everybody found the relationship charming. 
Some of the more conscientious people, it is true, 
pretended to think that the Reverend Harold Ben- 


72 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ham was a first husband and long since dead, but 
that was all. As a matter of fact, in his increasingly 
futile way he wasn’t, either at Seagate or in the 
Educational Supplement of the Times. But even 
the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to 
Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the 
Times. 

Lady Marayne’s plans for her son’s future varied 
very pleasantly. She was an industrious reader of 
biographies, and more particularly of the large fair 
biographies of the recently contemporary ; they men- 
tioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each 
sowed its imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop 
that flourished and flowered until a newer growth 
came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a 
prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted 
friend of the august, the bold leader of new move- 
ments, the saviour of ancient institutions, the young- 
est, brightest, modernest of prime ministers — or a 
tremendously popular poet. As a rule she saw him 
unmarried — with a wonderful little mother at his 
elbow. Sometimes in romantic flashes he was 
adored by German princesses or eloped with Russian 
grand-duchesses ! But such fancies were hors d? oeuvre. 
The modern biography deals with the career. 
Every project was bright, every project had go — 
tremendous go. And they all demanded a hero, 
d6bonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she be- 
gan to perceive, wasn’t balanced. Something of 
his father had crept into him, a touch of moral stiff- 
ness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


73 


a stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weak- 
ness. She tried not to admit to herself that even in 
the faintest degree it was there. But it was 
there. 

“Tell me all that you are doing now'' she said to 
him one afternoon when she had got him to herself 
during his first visit to Chexington Manor. “How 
do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? 
Have you joined that thing — the Union, is it? — 
and delivered your maiden speech? If you’re for 
politics, Poff, that’s your game. Have you begun it ? ” 

She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red 
cushions in the punt, a little curled-up figure of white, 
with her sweet pale animated face warmed by the 
reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little 
friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously 
graceful, sat at her feet and admired her beyond 
measure, and rejoiced that now at last they were 
going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it 
would be possible ever to love any other woman so 
much as he did her. 

He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends 
and the undergraduate life he was leading, but he 
found it difficult. All sorts of things that seemed 
right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in 
the peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All 
sorts of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and 
his associates he felt she wouldn’t accept, couldn’t 
accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. 
Before they could come before her they must wear 
a bravery. He couldn’t, for instance, tell her how 


74 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social 
pretension, had worn a straw hat into November 
and the last stages of decay, and how it had been 
burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the 
great court. He couldn’t convey to her the long 
sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that 
went on in Prothero ’s rooms into the small hours. 
A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddi- 
ness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles 
to its destiny, he concealed from her. What re- 
mained to tell was — attenuated. He could not 
romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. 
She tried to inspire a son who seemed most unac- 
countably up to nothing. 

“You must make good friends,” she said. “ Isn’t 
young Lord Breeze at your college? His mother 
the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy Quen- 
ton’s boy. And there are both the young Baptons 
at Cambridge.” 

He knew one of the Baptons. 

“ Poff,” she said suddenly, “ has it ever occurred 
to you what you are going to do afterwards. Do 
you know you are going to be quite well off?” 

Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. 
“My father said something. He was rather vague. 
It wasn’t his affair — that land of thing.” 

“You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without 
any complicating particulars. “You will be so well 
off that it will be possible for you to do anything 
almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie 
you. Nothing. ...” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


75 


“ But — how well off?” 

“ You will have several thousands a year.” 

“ Thousands?” 

“Yes. Why not?” 

“But — Mother, this is rather astounding. . . . 
Does this mean there are estates somewhere, re- 
sponsibilities ? ” 

“It is just money. Investments.” 

“You know, I’ve imagined — . I’ve thought al- 
ways I should have to do something.” 

“You must do something, Poff. But it needn’t 
be for a living. The world is yours without that. 
And so you see you’ve got to make plans. You’ve 
got to know the sort of people who’ll have things 
in their hands. You’ve got to keep out of — holes 
and comers. You’ve got to think of Parliament 
and abroad. There’s the army, there’s diplomacy. 
There’s the Empire. You can be a Cecil Rhodes if 
you like. You can be a Winston. ...” 

§5 

Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady 
Marayne which made her feel disappointed in her 
son’s outlook upon life. He did not choose among 
his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was 
going to be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for 
days. And he talked vaguely of wanting to do some- 
thing fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen 
ought to have at least the beginnings of savoir faire. 

Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the 
right college? Trinity, by his account, seemed a 


76 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


huge featureless place — and might he not conceiv- 
ably be lost in it ? In those big crowds one had to 
insist upon oneself. Poff never insisted upon him- 
self — except quite at the wrong moment. And 
there was this Billy Prothero. Billy ! Like a 
goat or something. People called William don’t 
get their Christian name insisted upon unless they 
are vulnerable somewhere. Any form of William 
stamps a weakness, Willie, Willy, Will, Billy, Bill ; 
it’s a fearful handle for one’s friends. At any rate 
Poff had escaped that. But this Prothero ! 

“But who is this Billy Prothero?” she asked one 
evening in the walled garden. 

“He was at Minchinghampton.” 

“But who is he? Who is his father? Where 
does he come from?” 

Benham sought in his mind for a space. “I 
don’t know,” he said at last. Billy had always 
been rather reticent about his people. She de- 
manded descriptions. She demanded an account 
of Billy’s furniture, Billy’s clothes, Billy’s form of 
exercise. It dawned upon Benham that for some 
inexplicable reason she was hostile to Billy. It 
was like the unmasking of an ambuscade. He 
had talked a lot about Prothero’s ideas and the 
discussions of social reform and social service 
that went on in his rooms, for Billy read at 
unknown times, and was open at all hours to 
any argumentative caller. To Lady Marayne all 
ideas were obnoxious, a form of fogging; all ideas, 
she held, were queer ideas. “And does he call 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


77 


himself a Socialist ?” she asked. “I thought he 
would.” 

“Poff,” she cried suddenly, “ you’re not a Social- 
ist ?” 

“Such a vague term.” 

“But these friends of yours — they seem to be 
all Socialists. Red ties and everything complete.” 

“They have ideas,” he evaded. He tried to 
express it better. “They give one something to 
take hold of.” 

She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted 
her finger at him, very seriously. “I hope,” she said 
with all her heart, “that you will have nothing to 
do with such ideas. Nothing. Socialism /” 

“They make a case.” 

“Pooh ! Any one can make a case.” 

“But—” 

“There’s no sense in them. What is the good of 
talking about upsetting everything? Just disorder. 
How can one do anything then? You mustn’t. 
You mustn’t. No. It’s nonsense, little Poff. It’s 
absurd. And you may spoil so much. ... I hate 
the way you talk of it. . . . As if it wasn’t all — 
absolutely — rubbish. ...” 

She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears. 

Why couldn’t her son go straight for his ends, 
clear tangible ends, as she had always done? This 
thinking about everything ! She had never thought 
about anything in all her life for more than half an 
hour — and it had always turned out remarkably 
well. 


78 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How 
on earth could he go on telling her his ideas if this 
was how they were to be taken? 

“I wish sometimes,” his mother said abruptly, 
with an unusually sharp note in her voice, “that you 
wouldn’t look quite so like your father.” 

“But I’m not like my father!” said Benham 
puzzled. 

“No,” she insisted, and with an air of appealing 
to his soberer reason, “so why should you go looking 
like him? That concerned expression. ...” 

She jumped to her feet. “ Poff,” she said, “ I want 
to go and see the evening primroses pop. You and 
I are talking nonsense. They don’t have ideas any- 
how. They just pop — as God meant them to do. 
What stupid things we human beings are!” 

Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most 
baffling of all. 

§ 6 

Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of 
Lady Marayne for all that disappointed her in Ben- 
ham. He had to become the symbol, because she 
could not think of complicated or abstract things, 
she had to make things personal, and he was the only 
personality available. She fretted over his exist- 
ence for some days therefore (once she awakened 
and thought about him in the night), and then sud- 
denly she determined to grasp her nettle. She de- 
cided to seize and obliterate this Prothero. He 
must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and 
conclusively led on, examined, ransacked, shown up, 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


79 


and disposed of for ever. At once. She was not 
quite clear how she meant to do this, but she was 
quite resolved Hiat it had to be done. Anything is 
better than inaction. 

There was a little difficulty about dates and engage- 
ments, but he came, and through the season of ex- 
pectation Benham, who was now for the first time in 
contact with the feminine nature, was delighted at 
the apparent change to cordiality. So that he talked 
of Billy to his mother much more than he had ever 
done before. 

Billy had been his particular friend at Minching- 
hampton, at least during the closing two years of 
his school life. Billy had fallen into friendship with 
Benham, as some of us fall in love, quite suddenly, 
when he saw Benham get down from the fence and 
be sick after his encounter with the bull. Already 
Billy was excited by admiration, but it was the in- 
congruity of the sickness conquered him. He went 
back to the school with his hands more than usually 
in his pockets, and no eyes for anything but this 
remarkable strung-up fellow-creature. He felt he 
had never observed Benham before, and he was as- 
tonished that he had not done so. 

Billy Prothero was a sturdy sort of boy, generously 
wanting in good looks. His hair was rough, and his 
complexion muddy, and he walked about with his 
hands in his pockets, long flexible lips protruded in 
a whistle, and a rather shapeless nose well up to show 
he didn’t care. Providence had sought to console 
him by giving him a keen eye for the absurdity of 


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other people. He had a suggestive tongue, and he 
professed and practised cowardice to the scandal 
of all his acquaintances. He was said never to wash 
behind his ears, but this report wronged him. There 
had been a time when he did not do so, but his mother 
had won him to a promise, and now that operation 
was often the sum of his simple hasty toilet. His 
desire to associate himself with Benham was so 
strong that it triumphed over a defensive reserve. 
It enabled him to detect accessible moments, do 
inobtrusive friendly services, and above all amuse his 
quarry. He not only amused Benham, he stimulated 
him. They came to do quite a number of things 
together. In the language of schoolboy stories 
they became “inseparables.” 

Prothero’s first desire, so soon as they were on a 
footing that enabled him to formulate desires, was to 
know exactly what Benham thought he was up to in 
crossing a field with a bull in it instead of going 
round, and by the time he began to understand that, 
he had conceived an affection for him that was to 
last a lifetime. 

“I wasn’t going to be bullied by a beast,” said 
Benham. 

“Suppose it had been an elephant?” Prothero 
cried. ... “A mad elephant? ... A pack of 
wolves?” 

Benham was too hone&t not to see that he was 
entangled. “Well, suppose in your case it had been 
a wild cat? ... A fierce mastiff? ... A mas- 
tiff? .. . A terrier? ... A lap dog?” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


81 


“ Yes, but my case is that there are limits.” 

Benham was impatient at the idea of limits. With 
a faintly malicious pleasure Prothero lugged him 
back to that idea. 

“We both admit there are limits,” Prothero 
concluded. “But between the absolutely impossible 
and the altogether possible there’s the region of risk. 
You think a man ought to take that risk — ” 
He reflected. “I think — no — I think not .” 

“If he feels afraid/’ cried Benham, seeing his one 
point. “If he feels afraid. Then he ought to take 
it. . . 

After a digestive interval, Prothero asked, “Why? 
Why should he?” 

The discussion of that momentous question, that 
Why? which Benham perhaps might never have 
dared ask himself, and which Prothero perhaps 
might never have attempted to answer if it had not 
been for the clash of their minds, was the chief topic 
of their conversation for many months. From Why 
be brave? it spread readily enough to Why be 
honest ? Why be clean ? — all the great whys of 
life. . . . Because one believes. . . . But why 
believe it? Left to himself Benham would have 
felt the mere asking of this question was a thing 
ignoble, not to be tolerated. It was, as it were, 
treason to nobility. But Prothero put it one after- 
noon in a way that permitted no high dismissal of 
their doubts. “You can’t build your honour on 
fudge, Benham. Like committing sacrilege — in 
order to buy a cloth for the altar.” 


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By that Benham was slipped from the recognized 
code and launched upon speculations which became 
the magnificent research. 

It was not only in complexion and stature and 
ways of thinking that Billy and Benham con- 
trasted. Benham inclined a little to eloquence, he 
liked very clean hands, he had a dread of ridiculous 
outlines. Prothero lapsed readily into ostentatious 
slovenliness, when his hands were dirty he pitied 
them sooner than scrubbed them, he would have 
worn an overcoat with one tail torn off rather than 
have gone cold. Moreover, Prothero had an earthy 
liking for animals, he could stroke and tickle strange 
cats until the^ wanted to leave father and mother 
and all earthly possessions and follow after him, 
and he mortgaged a term’s pocket money and bought 
and kept a small terrier in the school house against 
all law and tradition, under the baseless pretence that 
it was a stray animal of unknown origin. Benham, 
on the other hand, was shy with small animals and 
faintly hostile to big ones. Beasts he thought were 
just beasts. And Prothero had a gift for caricature, 
while Benham’s aptitude was for music. 

It was Prothero’s eyes and pencil that first directed 
Benham to the poor indolences and evasions and 
insincerities of the masters. It was Prothero’s 
wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled 
absurdity of the vulgar theology. But it was Ben- 
ham who stood between Prothero and that rather 
coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his 
logical destiny. When quite early in their Cam- 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


83 


bridge days Prothero’s revolt against foppery reached 
a nadir of personal neglect, and two philanthropists 
from the rooms below him, goaded beyond the 
normal tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two 
sportsmen from Trinity Hall, burnt his misshapen 
straw hat (after partly filling it with gunpowder and 
iron filings) and sought to duck him in the fountain 
in the court, it was Benham, in a state between dis- 
tress and madness, and armed with a horn-handled 
cane of exceptional size, who intervened, turned the 
business into a blend of wrangle and scuffle, intro- 
duced the degrading topic of duelling into a simple 
wholesome rag of four against one, carried him off 
under the cloud of horror created by this impro- 
priety and so saved him, still only slightly wetted, 
not only from this indignity but from the experi- 
ment in rationalism that had provoked it. 

Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he 
had thought and felt about this hat. 

Such was the illuminating young man whom Lady 
Marayne decided to invite to Chexington, into the 
neighbourhood of herself, Sir Godfrey, and her circle 
of friends. 

§7 

He was quite anxious to satisfy the requirements 
of Benham’s people and to do his friend credit. He 
was still in the phase of being a penitent pig, and he 
inquired carefully into the needs and duties of a 
summer guest in a country house. He knew it was 
quite a considerable country house, and that Sir 
Godfrey wasn’t Benham’s father, but like most 


84 


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people, he was persuaded that Lady Marayne had 
divorced the parental Benham. He arrived dressed 
very neatly in a brown suit that had only one fault, 
it had not the remotest suggestion of having been 
made for him. It fitted his body fairly well, it did 
annex his body with only a few slight incompatibil- 
ities, but it repudiated his hands and face. He had 
a conspicuously old Gladstone bag and a conspic- 
uously new despatch case, and he had forgotten black 
ties and dress socks and a hair brush. He arrived 
in the late afternoon, was met by Benham, in tennis 
flannels, looking smartened up and a little un- 
familiar, and taken off in a spirited dog-cart driven 
by a typical groom. He met his host and hostess 
at dinner. 

Sir Godfrey was a rationalist and a residuum. 
Very much of him, too much perhaps, had gone into 
the acquirement and perfect performance of the 
csecal operation; the man one met in the social 
world was what was left over. It had the effect of 
being quiet, but in its unobtrusive way knobby. 
He had a knobby brow, with an air about it of hav- 
ing recently been intent, and his conversation was 
curiously spotted with little knobby arrested anec- 
dotes. If any one of any distinction was named, 
he would reflect and say, “Of course, — ah, yes, I 
know him, I know him. Yes, I did him a little ser- 
vice— in ’96.” 

And something in his manner would suggest a 
satisfaction, or a dissatisfaction with confidential 
mysteries. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


85 


He welcomed Billy Prothero in a colourless man- 
ner, and made conversation about Cambridge. He 
had known one or two of the higher dons. One he 
had done at Cambridge quite recently. “The 
inns are better than they are at Oxford, which is 
not saying very much, but the place struck me as 
being changed. The men seemed younger. . . . ” 

The burden of the conversation fell upon Lady 
Marayne. She looked extraordinarily like a flower 
to Billy, a little diamond buckle on a black velvet 
band glittered between the two masses of butter- 
coloured hair that flowed back from her forehead, 
her head was poised on the prettiest neck conceiv- 
able, and her shapely little shoulders and her shapely 
little arms came decidedly but pleasantly out of a 
softness and sparkle of white and silver and old rose. 
She talked what sounded like innocent common- 
places a little spiced by whim, though indeed each 
remark had an exploratory quality, and her soft 
blue eyes rested ever and again upon Billy’s white 
tie. It seemed she did so by the merest inadver- 
tency, but it made the young man wish he had after 
all borrowed a black one from Benham. But the 
manservant who had put his things out had put it 
out, and he hadn’t been quite sure. Also she noted 
all the little things he did with fork and spoon and 
glass. She gave him an unusual sense of being 
brightly, accurately and completely visible. 

Chexington, it seemed to Billy, was done with a 
large and costly and easy completeness. The table 
with its silver and flowers was much more beauti- 


86 


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fully done than any table he had sat at before, and 
in the dimness beyond the brightness* there were 
two men to wait on the four of them. The old grey 
butler was really wonderfully good. . . . 

“You shoot, Mr. Prothero?” 

“You hunt, Mr. Prothero?” 

“You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?” 

These questions disturbed Prothero. He did not 
shoot, he did not hunt, he did not go to Scotland for 
the grouse, he did not belong, and Lady Marayne 
ought to have seen that he did not belong to the class 
that does these things. 

“You ride much, Mr. Prothero?” 

Billy conceived a suspicion that these innocent 
inquiries were designed to emphasize a contrast in 
his social quality. But he could not be sure. One 
never could be sure with Lady Marayne. It might 
be just that she did not understand the sort of man 
he was. And in that case ought he to maintain the 
smooth social surface unbroken by pretending as 
far as possible to be this kind of person, or ought he 
to make a sudden gap in it by telling his realities. 
He evaded the shooting question anyhow. He left 
it open for Lady Marayne and the venerable butler 
and Sir Godfrey and every one to suppose he just 
happened to be the sort of gentleman of leisure who 
doesn’t shoot. He disavowed hunting, he made it 
appear he travelled when he travelled in directions 
other than Scotland. But the fourth question 
brought him to bay. He regarded his questioner 
with his small rufous eye. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


87 


“I have never been across a horse in my life, 
Lady Marayne.” 

“Tut, tut,” said Sir Godfrey. “Why! — it's the 
best of exercise. Every man ought to ride. Good 
for the health. Keeps him fit. Prevents lodg- 
ments. Most trouble due to lodgments.” 

“I’ve never had a chance of riding. And I think 
I’m afraid of horses.” 

“That’s only an excuse,” said Lady Marayne. 
“Everybody’s afraid of horses and nobody’s really 
afraid of horses.” 

“But I’m not used to horses. You see — I live on 
my mother. And she can’t afford to keep a stable.” 

His hostess did not see his expression of discom- 
fort. Her pretty eyes. were intent upon the peas 
with which she was being served. 

“Does your mother live in the country?” she 
asked, and took her peas with fastidious exactness. 

Prothero coloured brightly. “She lives in London.” 

“All the year?” 

“All the year.” 

“But isn’t it dreadfully hot in town in the sum- 
mer?” 

Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being 
very red in the face. This kept him red. “We’re 
suburban people,” he said. 

“But I thought — isn’t there the seaside?” 

“My mother has a business,” said Prothero, redder 
than ever. 

“O-oh!” said Lady Marayne. “What fun that 
must be for her?” 


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“It’s a real business, and she has to live by it. 
Sometimes it’s a worry.” 

“But a business of her own !” She surveyed the 
confusion of his visage with a sweet intelligence. 
“Is it an amusing sort of business, Mr. Prothero?” 

Prothero looked mulish. “My mother is a dress- 
maker,” he said. “In Brixton. She doesn’t do 
particularly badly — or well. I live on my scholar- 
ship. I have lived on scholarships since I was 
thirteen. And you see, Lady Marayne, Brixton is 
a poor hunting country.” 

Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero 
almost indecently. Whatever happened there must 
be no pause. There must be no sign of a hitch. 

“But it’s good at tennis,” she said. “You do 
play tennis, Mr. Prothero?” 

“I — I gesticulate,” said Prothero. 

Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, 
went off at a tangent. 

“Poff, my dear,” she said, “I’ve had a diving- 
board put at the deep end of the pond.” 

The remark hung unanswered for a moment. 
The transition had been too quick for Benham’s 
state of mind. 

“Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?” the lady asked, 
though a moment before she had determined that 
she would never ask him a question again. But this 
time it was a lucky question. 

“Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minching- 
hampton with his diving and swimming,” Benham 
explained, and the tension was relaxed. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


80 


Lady Marayne spoke of her own swimming, and 
became daring and amusing at her difficulties with 
local feeling when first she swam in ‘the pond. The 
high road ran along the far side of the pond — “ And 
it didn’t wear a hedge or anything,” said Lady 
Marayne. “That was what they didn’t quite like. 
Swimming in an undraped pond. ...” 

Prothero had been examined enough. Now he 
must be entertained. She told stories about the 
village people in her brightest manner. The third 
story she regretted as soon as she was fairly launched 
upon it ; it was how she had interviewed the village 
dressmaker, when Sir Godfrey insisted upon her 
supporting local industries. It was very amusing 
but technical. The devil had put it into her head. 
She had to go through with it. She infused an ex- 
treme innocence into her eyes and fixed them on 
Prothero, although she felt a certain deepening pink- 
ness in her cheeks was betraying her, and she did 
not look at Benham until her unhappy, but other- 
wise quite amusing anecdote, was dead and gone 
and safely buried under another. .... 

But people ought not to go about having dress- 
makers for mothers. ... 

And coming into other people’s houses and influ- 
encing their sons. . . . 

§8 

That night when everything was over Billy sat 
at the writing-table of his sumptuous bedroom — the 
bed was gilt wood, the curtains of the three great 


90 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


windows were tremendous, and there was a cheval 
glass that showed the full length of him and seemed 
to look over his head for more, — and meditated 
upon this visit of his. It was more than he had been 
prepared for. It was going to be a great strain. 
The sleek young manservant in an alpaca jacket, 
who said “ Sir ” whenever you looked at him, and who 
had seized upon and unpacked Billy’s most private 
Gladstone bag without even asking if he might do so, 
and put away and displayed Billy’s things in a way 
that struck Billy as faintly ironical, was unexpected. 
And it was unexpected that the brown suit, with 
its pockets stuffed with Billy’s personal and confi- 
dential sundries, had vanished. And apparently a 
bath in a bathroom far down the corridor was pre- 
scribed for him in the morning ; he hadn’t thought 
of a dressing-gown. And after one had dressed, 
what did one do? Did one go down and wander 
about the house looking for the breakfast-room or 
wait for a gong? Would Sir Godfrey read Family 
Prayers? And afterwards did one go out or hang 
about to be entertained ? He knew now quite 
clearly that those wicked blue eyes would mark his 
every slip. She did not like him. She did not like 
him, he supposed, because he was common stuff. He 
didn’t play up to her world and her. He was a 
discord in this rich, cleverly elaborate household. 
You could see it in the servants’ attitudes. And he 
was committed to a week of this. 

Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then 
decided to be angry and say “Damn!” 


THE . BOY GROWS UP 


91 


This way of living which made him uncomfort- 
able was clearly an irrational and objectionable way 
of living. It was, in a cumbersome way, luxurious. 
But the waste of life of it, the servants, the obser- 
vances, all concentrated on the mere detail of exist- 
ence? There came a rap at the door. Benham 
appeared, wearing an expensive-looking dressing- 
jacket which Lady Marayne had bought for him. 
He asked if he might talk for a bit and smoke. He 
sat down in a capacious chintz-covered easy chair 
beside Prothero, lit a cigarette, and came to the point 
after only a trivial hesitation. 

“Prothero,” hesaid, “you know what my father is.” 

“I thought he ran a preparatory school.” 

There was the profoundest resentment in Proth- 
ero’s voice. 

“And, all the same, I’m going to be a rich man.” 

“I don’t understand,” said Prothero, without 
any shadow of congratulation. 

Benham told Prothero as much as his mother had 
conveyed to him of the resources of his wealth. 
Her version had been adapted to his tender years 
and the delicacies of her position. The departed 
Nolan had become an eccentric godfather. Ben- 
ham’s manner was apologetic, and he made it clear 
that only recently had these facts come to him. He 
had never suspected that he had had this eccentric 
godfather. It altered the outlook tremendously. 
It was one of the reasons that made Benham glad 
to have Prothero there, one wanted a man of one’s 
own age, who understood things a little, to try 


92 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


over one’s new ideas. Prothero listened with an 
unamiable expression. 

“What would you do, Prothero, if you found your- 
self saddled with some thousands a year?” 

“Godfathers don’t grow in Brixton,” said Prothero 
concisely. 

“Well, what am I to do, Prothero?” 

“Does all this belong to you?” 

“No, this is my mother’s.” 

“Godfather too?” 

“I’ve not thought. ... I suppose so. Or her 
own.” 

Prothero meditated. 

11 This life,” he said at last, “this large expensive- 
ness — . . 

He left his criticism unfinished. 

“I agree. It suits my mother somehow. I can’t 
understand her living in any other way. But — 
for me. ...” 

“What can one do with several thousands a 
year?” 

Prothero ’s interest in this question presently 
swamped his petty personal resentments. “I sup- 
pose,” he said, “one might have rather a lark with 
money like that. One would be free to go any- 
where. To set all sorts of things going. ... It’s 
clear you can’t sell all you have and give it to the 
poor. That is pauperization nowadays. You might 
run a tremendously revolutionary paper. A real 
upsetting paper. How many thousands is it?” 

“I don’t know. Some” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


93 


Prothero’s interest was growing as he faced the 
possibilities. 

“I’ve dreamt of a paper,” he said, “a paper that 
should tell the brute truth about things.” 

“I don’t know that I’m particularly built to be a 
journalist,” Benham objected. 

“ You’re not,” said Billy. . . . “You might go 
into Parliament as a perfectly independent member. 
. . . Only you wouldn’t get in. ...” 

“I’m not a speaker,” said Benham. 

“Of course,” said Billy, “if you don’t decide on a 
game, you’ll just go on like this. You’ll fall into a 
groove, you’ll — you’ll hunt. You’ll go to Scot- 
land for the grouse.” 

For the moment Prothero had no further sugges- 
tions. 

Benham waited for a second or so before he 
broached his own idea. 

“Why, first of all, at any rate, Billy, shouldn’t 
one use one’s money to make the best of oneself? 
To learn things that men without money and leisure 
find it difficult to learn? By an accident, however 
unjust it is, one is in the position of a leader and a 
privileged person. Why not do one’s best to give 
value as that?” 

“Benham, that’s the thin end of aristocracy!” 

“Why not?” 

“I hate aristocracy. For you it means doing 
what you like. While you are energetic you 
will kick about and then you will come back to 
this.” 


94 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“That's one's own look-out," said Benham, after 
reflection. 

“No, it's bound to happen." 

Benham retreated a little from the immediate 
question. 

“Well, we can't suddenly at a blow change the 
world. If it isn't to be plutocracy to-day it has to 
be aristocracy." 

Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a 
sweeping proposition. 

“ You cannot have aristocracy ," he said, “because, 
you see — all men are ridiculous. Democracy has to 
fight its way out from under plutocracy. There is 
nothing else to be done." 

“But a man in my position — ?" 

“It's a ridiculous position. You may try to escape 
being ridiculous. You won't succeed." 

It seemed to Benham for a moment as though 
Prothero had got to the bottom of the question, and 
then he perceived that he had only got to the bottom 
of himself. Benham was pacing the floor. 

He turned at the open window, held out a long 
forefinger, and uttered his countervailing faith. 

“Even if he is ridiculous, Prothero, a man may still 
be an aristocrat. A man may anyhow be as much of 
an aristocrat as he can be." 

Prothero reflected. “No," he said, “it sounds all 
right, but it's wrong. I hate all these advantages 
and differences and distinctions. A man's a man. 
What you say sounds well, but it's the beginning 
of pretension, of pride — " 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


95 


He stopped short. 

“ Better pride than dishonour,” said Benham, 
“ better the pretentious life than the sordid life. 
What else is there?” 

“A life isn’t necessarily sordid because it isn’t pre- 
tentious,” said Prothero, his voice betraying a defen- 
sive disposition. 

“But a life with a large income must be sordid 
unless it makes some sort of attempt to be fine. . . .” 

§9 

By transitions that were as natural as they were 
complicated and untraceable Prothero found his 
visit to Chexington developing into a tangle of dis- 
cussions that all ultimately resolved themselves 
into an antagonism of the democratic and the aris- 
tocratic idea. And his part was, he found, to be the 
exponent of the democratic idea. The next day 
he came down early, his talk with Benham still 
running through his head, and after a turn or so in 
the garden he was attracted to the front door by a 
sound of voices, and found Lady Maraype had been 
up still earlier and was dismounting from a large 
effective black horse. This extorted an unwilling 
admiration from him. She greeted him very pleas- 
antly and made a kind of introduction of her steed. 
There had been trouble at a gate, he was a young 
horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still 
bright in her. Benham she declared was still in 
bed. “Wait till I have a mount for him.” She 
reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and then 


96 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


lie was left to Benham until just before lunch. 
They read and afterwards, as the summer day grew 
hot, they swam in the nude pond. She joined them 
in the water, splashing about in a costume of some 
elaboration and being very careful not to wet her 
hair. Then she came and sat with them on the seat 
under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap 
that was pretty rather than prudish and entirely 
unmotherly. And she began a fresh attack upon 
him by asking him if he wasn’t a Socialist and 
whether he didn’t want to pull down Chexington 
and grow potatoes all over the park. 

This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement 
of the Socialist project and he made an unsuccessful 
attempt to get it amended. 

The engagement thus opened was renewed with 
great energy at lunch. Sir Godfrey had returned 
to London and the inmost aspect of his fellow- 
creatures, but the party of three was supplemented 
by a vague young lady from the village and an 
alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate 
who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne 
insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to 
reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an in- 
version of society so that it would be bottom up- 
ward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. “ And 
what good are all these proposals? If you had 
the poor dear king beheaded, you’d only get a 
Napoleon. If you divided all the property up be- 
tween everybody, you’d have rich and poor again 
in a year.” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


97 


Billy perceived no way of explaining away this 
version of his Socialism that would not involve un- 
civil contradictions — and nobody ever contradicted 
Lady Marayne. 

“But, Lady Marayne, don’t you think there is 
a lot of disorder and injustice in the world?” he 
protested. 

“There would be ever so much more if your 
Socialists had their way.” 

“But still, don’t you think — ...” 

It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these uni- 
versal controversies of our time. The lunch-table 
and the dinner-table and the general talk of the house 
drifted more and more definitely at its own level in 
the same direction as the private talk of Prothero 
and Benham, towards the antagonism of the privi- 
leged few and the many, of the trained and tradi- 
tioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aris- 
tocracy against democracy. At the week-end Sir 
Godfrey returned to bring fresh elements. He said 
that democracy was unscientific. “To deny aris- 
tocracy is to deny the existence of the fittest. It 
is on the existence of the fittest that progress de- 
pends.” 

“But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?” 
asked Prothero. 

“That is another question,” said Benham. 

“Exactly,” said Sir Godfrey. “That is another 
question. But speaking with some special knowl- 
edge, I should say that on the whole the people 
who are on the top of things ought to be on the top 


98 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


of things. I agree with Aristotle that there is such 
a thing as a natural inferior.” 

“So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero,” said 
Lady Marayne, “he thinks that all the inferiors are 
the superiors and all the superiors inferior. It's quite 
simple. . . .” 

It made Prothero none the less indignant with 
this, that there was indeed a grain of truth in it. 
He hated superiors, he felt for inferiors. 

§ 10 

At last came the hour of tipping. An embar- 
rassed and miserable Prothero went slinking about 
the house distributing unexpected gold. 

It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to 
borrow the money from his mother. . . . 

Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her. The con- 
troversy that should have split these two young 
men apart had given them a new interest in each 
other. When afterwards she sounded her son, very 
delicately, to see if indeed he was aware of the clum- 
siness, the social ignorance and uneasiness, the 
complete unsuitability of his friend, she could get 
no more from him than that exasperating phrase, 
“He has ideas !” 

What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by 
ideas. 

He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that mon- 
ster packet of everything. He ought to have gone 
to some little good college, good all through. She 
ought to have asked some one who knew. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


99 


§11 

One glowing afternoon in October, as these two 
young men came over Magdalen Bridge after a 
long disputatious and rather tiring walk to Drayton 
— they had been talking of Eugenics and the 
“family” — Benham was almost knocked down by 
an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze. “ Whup 
there!” said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately 
brutal, and Benham, roused from that abstraction 
which is partly fatigue, had to jump aside and 
stumbled against the parapet as the gaunt pacer 
went pounding by. 

Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remem- 
bers. And passed. 

“Damnation !” said Benham with a face that had 
become suddenly very white. 

Then presently. “Any fool can do that who 
cares to go to the trouble.” 

“That,” said Prothero, talcing up their unquench- 
able issue, “that is the feeling of democracy.” 

“I walk because I choose to,” said Benham. 

The thing rankled. 

“This equestrianism,” he began, “is a matter of 
time and money — time even more than money. I 
want to read. I want to deal with ideas. . . . 

“Any fool can drive. ...” 

“Exactly,” said Prothero. 

“As for riding, it means no more than the elabo- 
rate study and cultivation of your horse. You have 
to know him. All horses are individuals. A made 


100 


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horse perhaps goes its round like an omnibus, but 
for the rest. . . .” 

Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent. 

“In a country where equestrianism is assertion 
I suppose one must be equestrian. ...” 

That night some malignant spirit kept Benham 
awake, and great American trotters with vast wide- 
striding feet and long yellow teeth, uncontrollable, 
hard-mouthed American trotters, pounded over his 
angry soul. 

“Prothero,” he said in hall next day, “we are 
going to drive to-morrow.” 

Next day, so soon as they had lunched, he led 
the way towards Maltby’s, in Crosshampton Lane. 
Something in his bearing put a question into 
Prothero’s mind. “Benham,” he asked, “have you 
ever driven before?” 

“Never,” said Benham. 

“Well?” 

“I’m going to now.” 

Something between pleasure and alarm came 
into Prothero’s eyes. He quickened his pace so 
as to get alongside his friend and scrutinize his 
pale determination. “Why are you doing this?” 
he asked. 

“I want to do it.” 

“Benham, is it — equestrian ?” 

Benham made no audible reply. They proceeded 
resolutely in silence. 

An air of expectation prevailed in Maltby’s yard. 
In the shafts of a high, bleak-looking vehicle with 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


101 


vast side wheels, a throne-like vehicle that impressed 
Billy Prothero as being a gig, a very large angular 
black horse was being harnessed. 

“This is mine,” said Benham compactly. 

“This is yours, sir,” said an ostler. 

“He looks — quiet” 

“You’ll find him fresh enough, sir.” 

Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver’s 
seat and was handed the reins. “ Come on,” he said, 
and Prothero followed to a less exalted seat at Ben- 
ham’s side. They seemed to be at a very great 
height indeed. The horse was then led out into 
Crosshampton Lane, faced towards Trinity Street 
and discharged. “Check,” said Benham, and 
touched the steed with his whip. They started 
quite well, and the ostlers went back into the 
yard, visibly unanxious. It struck Prothero that 
perhaps driving was less difficult than he had sup- 
posed. 

They went along Crosshampton Lane, that high- 
walled gulley, with dignity, with only a slight sugges- 
tion of the inaccuracy that was presently to become 
apparent, until they met a little old bearded don on 
a bicycle. Then some misunderstanding arose be- 
tween Benham and the horse, and the little bearded 
don was driven into the narrow pavement and had 
to get off hastily. He made no comment, but his 
face became like a gargoyle. “Sorry,” said Benham, 
and gave his mind to the corner. There was some 
difficulty about whether they were to turn to the 
right or the left, but at last Benham, it seemed, 


102 


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carried his point, and they went along the narrow 
street, past the grey splendours of King’s, and rather 
in the middle of the way. 

Prothero considered the beast in front of him, 
and how proud and disrespectful a horse in a dog- 
cart can seem to those behind it ! Moreover, un- 
accustomed as he was to horses, he was struck by 
the strong resemblance a bird’s-eye view of a horse 
bears to a fiddle, a fiddle with devil’s ears. 

“Of course,” said Prothero, “this isn’t a trotter.” 

“I couldn’t get a trotter,” said Benham. 

“I thought I would try this sort of thing before 
I tried a trotter,” he added. 

And then suddenly came disaster. 

There was a butcher’s cart on the right, and Ben- 
ham, mistrusting the intelligence of his steed, in- 
sisted upon an excessive amplitude of clearance. 
He did not reckon with the hand-barrow on his left, 
piled up with dirty plates from the lunch of Trinity 
Hall. It had been left there; its custodian was 
away upon some mysterious errand. Heaven knows 
why Trinity Hall exhibited the treasures of its 
crockery thus stained and defiled in the Cambridge 
streets. But it did — for Benham’s and Prothero’s 
undoing. Prothero saw the great wheel over which 
he was poised entangle itself with the little wheel 
of the barrow. “God!” he whispered, and craned, 
fascinated. The little wheel was manifestly in- 
trigued beyond all self-control by the great wheel ; 
it clung to it, it went before it, heedless of the 
barrow, of which it was an inseparable part. The 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


103 


barrow came about with an appearance of unwilling- 
ness, it locked against the great wheel; it reared 
itself towards Prothero and began, smash, smash, 
smash, to shed its higher plates. It was clear that 
Benham was grappling with a crisis upon a basis of 
inadequate experience. A number of people shouted 
haphazard things. Then, too late, the barrow had 
persuaded the little wheel to give up its fancy 
for the great wheel, and there was an enormous 
crash. 

“Whoa!” cried Benham. “Whoa!” but also, 
unfortunately, he sawed hard at the horse’s mouth. 

The animal, being in some perplexity, danced a 
little in the narrow street, and then it had come about 
and it was backing, backing, on the narrow pavement 
and towards the plate-glass window of a book and 
newspaper shop. Benham tugged at its mouth 
much harder than ever. Prothero saw the window 
bending under the pressure of the wheel. A sense 
of the profound seriousness of life and of the folly 
of this expedition came upon him. With extreme 
nimbleness he got down just as the window burst. 
It went with an explosion like a pistol shot, and then 
a clatter of falling glass. People sprang, it seemed, 
from nowhere, and jostled about Prothero, so that 
he became a peripheral figure in the discussion. 
He perceived that a man in a green apron was hold- 
ing the horse, and that various people were engaged 
in simultaneous conversation with Benham, who 
with a pale serenity of face and an awful calm of 
manner, dealt with each of them in turn. 


104 


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“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “ Somebody ought 
to have been in charge of the barrow. Here are my 
cards. I am ready to pay for any damage. . . . 

“The barrow ought not to have been there. . . . 

“Yes, I am going on. Of course I’m going on. 
Thank you.” 

He beckoned to the man who had held the horse 
and handed him half-a-crown. He glanced at 
Prothero as one might glance at a stranger. 
“Check!” he said. The horse went on gravely. 
Benham lifted out his whip. He appeared to have 
clean forgotten Prothero. Perhaps presently he 
would miss him. He went on past Trinity, past 
the ruddy brick of St. John’s. The curve of the 
street hid him from Prothero ’s eyes. 

Prothero started in pursuit. He glimpsed the 
dog-cart turning into Bridge Street. He had an 
impression that Benham used the whip at the corner, 
and that the dog-cart went forward out of sight with 
a startled jerk. Prothero quickened his pace. 

But when he got to the fork between the Hunt- 
ingdon Road and the Cottenham Road, both roads 
were clear. 

He spent some time in hesitation. Then he went 
along the Huntingdon Road until he came upon a 
road-mender, and learnt that Benham had passed 
that way. “Going pretty fast ’e was,” said the 
road-mender, “and whipping ’is ’orse. Else you 
might ’a thought ’e was a boltin’ with ’im.” 
Prothero decided that if Benham came back at all 
he would return by way of Cottenham, and it was 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


105 


on the Cottenham Road that at last he encountered 
his friend again. 

Benham was coming along at that good pace which 
all experienced horses when they are fairly turned 
back towards Cambridge display. And there was 
something odd about Benham, as though he had a 
large circular halo with a thick rim. This, it seemed, 
had replaced his hat. He was certainly hatless. 
The warm light of the sinking sun shone upon the 
horse and upon Benham’s erect figure and upon his 
face, and gleams of fire kept flashing from his head 
to this rim, like the gleam of drawn swords seen from 
afar. As he drew nearer this halo detached itself 
from him and became a wheel sticking up behind 
him. A large, clumsy-looking bicycle was attached 
to the dog-cart behind. The expression of Benham’s 
golden face was still a stony expression ; he regarded 
his friend with hard eyes. 

“You all right, Benham ?” cried Prothero, ad- 
vancing into the road. 

His eye examined the horse. It looked all right, 
if anything it was a trifle subdued ; there was a little 
foam about its mouth, but not very much. 

“Whoa!” said Benham, and the horse stopped. 
“Are you coming up, Prothero?” 

Prothero clambered up beside him. “I was 
anxious,” he said. 

“There was no need to be.” 

“YouVe broken your whip.” 

“Yes. It broke. ... Get up V 7 

They proceeded op their way to Cambridge. 


106 


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“ Something has happened to the wheel,” said 
Prothero, trying to be at his ease. 

“ Merely a splinter or so. And a spoke perhaps.” 

“And what is this behind?” 

Benham made a half-turn of the head. “It’s a 
motor-bicycle.” 

Prothero took in details. 

“Some of it is missing.” 

“No, the front wheel is under the seat.” 

“Oh!” 

“Did you find it?” Prothero asked, after an 
interval. 

“No.” 

“You mean?” 

“He ran into a motor-car — as I was passing. I 
was perhaps a little to blame. He asked me to 
bring his machine to Cambridge. He went on in 
the car. ... It is all perfectly simple.” 

Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel 
with a renewed interest. 

“Did your wheel get into it?” he asked. 

Benham affected not to hear. He was evidently 
in no mood for story-telling. 

“Why did you get down, Prothero?” he asked 
abruptly, with the note of suppressed anger thicken- 
ing his voice. 

Prothero became vividly red. “I don’t know,” he 
said, after an interval. 

“I do,” said Benham, and they went on in a rich 
and active silence to Cambridge, and the bicycle 
repair shop in Bridge Street, and Trinity College. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


107 


At the gate of Trinity Benham stopped, and con- 
veyed rather by acts than words that Prothero was 
to descend. He got down meekly enough, although 
he felt that the return to Maltby’s yard might have 
many points of interest. But the spirit had gone 
out of him. 

§ 12 

For three days the two friends avoided each other, 
and then Prothero went to Benham’s room. Ben- 
ham was smoking cigarettes — Lady Marayne, in 
the first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited 
his pipe — and reading Webb’s Industrial Democ- 
racy. “Hello!” he said coldly, scarcely looking 
up, and continued to read that absorbing work. 

“I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that 
damned dog-cart,” said Prothero, without any 
preface. 

“It didn’t matter in the least,” said Benham 
distantly. 

“Oh! Rot” said Prothero. “I behaved like a 
coward.” 

Benham shut his book. 

“Benham,” said Prothero. “You are right about 
aristocracy, and I am wrong. I’ve been thinking 
about it night and day.” 

Benham betrayed no emotion. But his tone 
changed. “Billy,” he said, “there are cigarettes 
and whiskey in the corner. Don’t make a fuss 
about a trifle.” 

“No whiskey,” said Billy, and lit a cigarette. 
“And it isn’t a trifle.” 


108 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


He came to Benham’s hearthrug. “That busi- 
ness, he said, “has changed all my views. No — 
don’t say something polite ! I see that if one hasn’t 
the habit of pride one is bound to get off a dog- 
cart when it seems likely to smash. You have 
the habit of pride, and I haven’t. So far as the 
habit of pride goes, I come over to the theory of 
aristocracy.” 

Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney 
and Beatrice Webb, and reached out for and got and 
lit a cigarette. 

“I give up ‘Go as you please.’ I give up the 
natural man. I admit training. I perceive I am 
lax and flabby, unguarded, I funk too much, I eat 
too much, and I drink too much. And, yet, what I 
have always liked in you, Benham, is just this — 
that you don’t.” 

“I do,” said Benham. 

“Do what?” 

“Funk.” 

“Benham, I believe that naturally you funk as 
much as I do. You’re more a thing of nerves than 
I am, far more. But you keep yourself up to the 
mark, and I have let myself get flabby. You’re so 
right. You’re so utterly right. These last nights 
I’ve confessed it — aloud. I had an inkling of it 
— after that rag. But now it’s as clear as daylight. 
I don’t know if you mean to go on with me, after 
what’s happened, but anyhow I want you to know, 
whether you end our friendship or not — ” 

“Billy, don’t be an old ass,” said Benham. 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


109 


Both young men paused for a moment. They 
made no demonstrations. But the strain was at 
an end between them. 

“I’ve thought it all out,” Billy went on with a 
sudden buoyancy. “We two are both of the same 
kind of men. Only you see, Benham, you have a 
natural pride and I haven’t. You have pride. But 
we are both intellectuals. We both belong to what 
the Russians call the Intelligentsia. We have ideas, 
we have imagination, that is our strength. And that 
is our weakness. That makes us moral light-weights. 
We are flimsy and uncertain people. All intellec- 
tuals are flimsy and uncertain people. It’s not only 
that they are critical and fastidious ; they are 
weak-handed. They look about them ; their atten- 
tion wanders. Unless they have got a habit of 
controlling themselves and forcing themselves and 
holding themselves together.” 

“The habit of pride.” 

“Yes. And then — then we are lords of the world. ’ ’ 

“All this, Billy,” said Benham, “I steadfastly 
believe.” 

“I’ve seen it all now,” said Prothero. “Lord! 
how clearly I see it ! The intellectual is either a 
prince or he is a Greek slave in a Roman household. 
He’s got to hold his chin up or else he becomes — 
even as these dons we see about us — a thing that 
talks appointments, a toady, a port-wine bibber, 
a mass of detail, a conscious maker of neat sayings, 
a growing belly under a dwindling brain. Their 
gladness is drink or gratified vanity or gratified 


110 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


malice, their sorrow is indigestion or — old maid’s 
melancholy. They are the lords of the world 
who will not take the sceptre. . . . And what I 
want to say to you, Benham, more than anything 
else is, you go on — you make yourself equestrian. 
You drive your horse against Breeze’s, and go 
through the fire and swim in the ice-cold water and 
climb the precipice and drink little and sleep hard. 
And — I wish I could do so too.” 

“But why not?” 

“Because I can’t. Now I admit I’ve got shame 
in my heart and pride in my head, and I’m strung 
up. I might do something — this afternoon. But 
it won’t last. You — you have pride in your bones. 
My pride will vanish at a laugh. My honour will 
go ata laugh. I’m just exalted by a crisis. That’s 
all. I’m an animal of intelligence. Soul and pride 
are weak in me. My mouth waters, my cheek 
brightens, at the sight of good things. And I’ve 
got a lickerish tail, Benham. You don’t know. 
You don’t begin to imagine. I’m secretive. But I 
quiver with hot and stirring desires. And I’m indo- 
lent — dirty indolent. Benham, there are days 
when I splash my bath about without getting into 
it. There are days when I turn back from a Walk 
because there’s a cow in the field. . . . But, I 
spare you the viler details. . . . And it’s that 
makes me hate fine people and try so earnestly to 
persuade myself that any man is as good as any 
man, if not a trifle better. Because I know it isn’t 

77 


SO. . . 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


111 


“Billy,” said Benham, “you've the boldest mind 
that ever I met.” 

Prothero's face lit with satisfaction. Then his 
countenance fell again. “I know I'm better there/' 
he said, “and yet, see how I let in a whole system of 
lies to cover my secret humiliations. There, at 
least, I will cling to pride. I will at least think 
free and clean and high. But you can climb higher 
than I can. You've got the grit to try and live high. 
There you are, Benham.'' 

Benham stuck one leg over the arm of his chair. 

“Billy,” he said, “come and be — equestrian and 
stop this nonsense.” 

“No.” 

“Damn it — you dive!” 

“You'd go in before me if a woman was drowning.” 

“Nonsense. I'm going to ride. Come and ride 
too. You've a cleverer way with animals than I 
have. Why ! that horse I was driving the other day 
would have gone better alone. I didn't drive it. 
I just fussed it. I interfered. If I ride for ever, 
I shall never have decent hands, I shall always hang 
on my horse's mouth at a gallop, I shall never be 
sure at a jump. But at any rate I shall get hard. 
Come and get hard too.” 

“You can,” said Billy, “you can. But not I! 
Heavens, the trouble of it ! The riding-school ! 
The getting up early ! No ! — for me the Trump- 
ington Road on foot in the afternoon. Four miles 
an hour and panting. And my fellowship and the 
combination-room port. And, besides, Benham, 


112 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


there’s the expense. I can’t afford the equestrian 
order.” 

“It’s not so great.” 

“Not so great! I don’t mean the essential 
expense. But — the incidentals. I don’t know 
whether any one can realize how a poor man is ham- 
pered by the dread of minor catastrophes. It isn’t so 
much that he is afraid of breaking his neck, Benham, 
as that he is afraid of breaking something he will have 
to pay for. For instance — . Benham ! how much 
did your little expedition the other day — ?” 

He stopped short and regarded his friend with 
round eyes and raised eyebrows. 

A reluctant grin overspread Benham’s face. He 
was beginning to see the humour of the affair. 

“The claim for the motor-bicycle isn’t sent in yet. 
The repair of the mudguards of the car is in dispute. 
Trinity Hall’s crockery, the plate-glass window, the 
whip-lash and wheel and so forth, the hire of the horse 
and trap, sundry gratuities. ... I doubt if the 
total will come very much under fifty pounds. And 
I seem to have lost a hat somewhere.” 

Billy regarded his toes and cleared his throat. 

“Depending as I do on a widowed mother in 
Brixton for all the expenditure that isn’t covered by 
my pot-hunting — ” 

“Of course,” said Benham, “it wasn’t a fair sample 
afternoon.” 

“Still—” 

“There’s footer,” said Benham, “we might both 
play footer.” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


113 


“Or boxing.’ ’ 

“And, anyhow, you must come with me when I 
drive again. I’m going to start a trotter.” 

“If I miss another drive may I be — lost for 
ever,” said Billy, with the utmost sincerity. “Never 
more will I get down, Benham, wherever you may 
take me. Short of muffing my fellowship I’m with 
you always. . . . Will it be an American trotter?” 

“It will be the rawest, gauntest, ungainliest brute 
that ever scared the motor-bicycles on the North- 
ampton Road. It will have the legs and stride of 
an ostrich. It will throw its feet out like dealing 
cards. It will lift its head and look the sun in the 
eye like a vulture. It will have teeth like the Eng- 
lish spinster in a French comic paper. . . . And 
we will fly. ...” 

“I shall enjoy it very much,” said Prothero in a 
small voice after an interval for reflection. “I 
wonder where we shall fly. It will do us both a lot 
of good. And I shall insure my life for a small 
amount in my mother’s interest. . . . Benham, I 
think I will, after all, take a whiskey. . . . Life is 
short. ...” 

He did so and Benham strolled to the window and 
stood looking out upon the great court. 

“We might do something this afternoon,” said 
Benham. 

“Splendid idea,” reflected Billy over his whiskey. 
“Liying hard and thinking hard. A sort of Intel- 
ligentsia that is blooded. ... I shall, of course 
come as far as I can with you.” 


114 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


§13 

In one of the bureau drawers that White in this 
capacity of literary executor was examining, there 
were two documents that carried back right to these 
early days. They were both products of this long 
wide undergraduate argumentation that had played 
so large a part in the making of Benham. One 
recorded the phase of maximum opposition, and one 
was the outcome of the concluding approach of the 
antagonists. They were debating club essays. One 
had been read to a club in Pembroke, a club called 
the Enquirers , of which White also had been a member, 
and as he turned it over he found the circumstances 
of its reading coming back to his memory. He had 
been present, and Carnac’s share in the discussion 
with his shrill voice and stumpy gestures would alone 
have sufficed to have made it a memorable occasion. 
The later one had been read to the daughter club of 
the Enquirers , the Social Enquirers , in the year after 
White had gone down, and it was new to him. 

Both these papers were folded flat and neatly 
docketed ; they were rather yellow and a little dog- 
eared, and with the outer sheet pencilled over with 
puzzling or illegible scribblings, Benham’s memo- 
randa for his reply. White took the earlier essay in 
his hand. At the head of the first page was written 
in large letters, “Go slowly, speak to the man at 
the back.” It brought up memories of his own 
experiences, of rows of gaslit faces, and of a friendly 
helpful voice that said, “Speak up?” 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


115 


Of course this was what happened to every intel- 
ligent contemporary, this encounter with ideas, this 
restatement and ventilation of the old truths and the 
old heresies. Only in this way does a man make a 
view his own, only so does he incorporate it. These 
are our real turning points. The significant, the 
essential moments in the life of any one worth con- 
sideration are surely these moments when for the 
first time he faces towards certain broad ideas and 
certain broad facts. Life nowadays consists of 
adventures among generalizations. In class-rooms 
after the lecture, in studies in the small hours, among 
books or during solitary walks, the drama of the 
modern career begins. Suddenly a man sees his 
line, his intention. Yet though we are all of us 
writing long novels — White’s world was the literary 
world, and that is how it looked to him — which 
profess to set out the lives of men, this part of 
the journey, this crucial passage among the Sphinxes, 
is still done — when it is done at all — slightly, 
evasively. Why ? 

WTiite fell back on his professionalism. “It does 
not make a book. It makes a novel into a treatise, 
it turns it into a dissertation.” 

But even as White said this to himself he knew it 
was wrong, and it slid out of his thoughts again. 
Was not this objection to the play of ideas merely 
the expression of that conservative instinct which 
fights for every old convention? The traditional 
novel is a love story and takes ideas for granted, it 
professes a hero but presents a heroine. And to 


116 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


begin with at least, novels were written for the 
reading of heroines. Miss Lydia Languish sets no 
great store upon the contents of a man's head. 
That is just the stuffing of the doll. Eyes and heart 
are her game. And so there is never any more 
sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate. 
And as inevitably the heroine meets a man. In his 
own first success, White reflected, the hero, before 
he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant young 
woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket; the 
second opened at once with a bicycle accident that 
brought two young people together so that they 
were never afterwards disentangled ; the third, 
failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to 
be rearranged. The next — 

White returned from an unprofitable digression to 
the matter before him. 


§ 14 

The first of Benham’s early essays was written in 
an almost boyish hand, it was youthfully amateurish 
in its nervous disposition to definitions and distinc- 
tions, and in the elaborate linking of part to part. 
It was called True Democracy. Manifestly it was 
written before the incident of the Trinity Hall 
plates, and most of it had been done after Prothero’s 
visit to Chexington. White could feel that now 
inaudible interlocutor. And there were even traces 
of Sir Godfrey Marayne’s assertion that democracy 
was contrary to biology. From the outset it was 
clear that whatever else it meant, True Democracy, 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


117 


following the analogy of True Politeness, True 
Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not 
mean democracy at all. Benham was, in fact, taking 
Prothero’s word, and trying to impose upon it his 
own solidifying and crystallizing opinion of life. 

They were not as yet very large or well-formed 
crystals. The proposition he struggled to develop 
was this, that True Democracy did not mean an equal 
share in the government, it meant an equal oppor- 
tunity to share in the government. Men were by 
nature and in the most various ways unequal. 
True Democracy aimed only at the removal of 
artificial inequalities. . . . 

It was on the truth of this statement, that men 
were by nature unequal, that the debate had turned. 
Prothero was passionately against the idea at that 
time. It was, he felt, separating himself from 
Benham more and more. He spoke with a personal 
bitterness. And he found his chief ally in a rigorous 
and voluble Frenchman named Carnac, an aggres- 
sive Roman Catholic, who opened his speech by 
saying that the first aristocrat was the devil, and 
shocked Prothero by claiming him as probably the 
only other sound Christian in the room. Several 
biologists were present, and one tall, fair youth with 
a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac with 
questions. 

“But you must admit some men are taller than 
others?” 

“Then the others are broader.” 

“Some are smaller altogether.” 


118 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ Nimbler — it’s notorious.” 

“Some of the smaller are less nimble than the 
others.” 

“Then they have better nightmares. How can 
you tell?” 

The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and 
the talk went on over his prostrate attempts to 
rally and protest. 

A second biologist seemed to Benham to come 
nearer the gist of the dispute when he said that they 
were not discussing the importance of men, but their 
relative inequalities. Nobody was denying the 
equal importance of everybody. But there was a 
virtue of this man and a virtue of that. Nobody 
could dispute the equal importance of every wheel 
in a machine, of every atom in the universe. Proth- 
ero and Carnac were angry because they thought 
the denial of absolute equality was a denial of equal 
importance. That was not so. Every man mat- 
tered in his place. But politically, or economically, 
or intellectually that might be a lowly place. . . . 

At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping 
and great violence, and a volley of obscure French 
colloquialisms. 

He was understood to convey that the speaker was 
a Jew, and did not in the least mean what he was say- 
ing. . . . 

§15 

The second paper was an altogether maturer and 
more characteristic production. It was no longer 
necessary to answer Prothero. Prothero had been 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


119 


incorporated. And Benham had fairly got away 
with his great idea. It was evident to White that 
this paper had been worked over on several occasions 
since its first composition and that Benham had 
intended to make it a part of his book. There were 
corrections in pencil and corrections in a different 
shade of ink, and there was an unfinished new per- 
oration, that was clearly the latest addition of all. 
Yet its substance had been there always. It gave 
the youth just grown to manhood, but anyhow fully 
grown. It presented the far-dreaming intellectualist 
shaped. 

Benham had called it Aristocracy. But he was far 
away by now from political aristocracy. 

This time he had not begun with definitions and 
generalizations, but with a curiously subjective 
appeal. He had not pretended to be theorizing at 
large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his 
own life and as manifestly he was thinking of life 
as a matter of difficulty and unexpected thwartings. 

“We see life,” he wrote, “not only life in the 
world outside us, but life in our own selves, as an 
immense choice of possibilities ; indeed, for us in 
particular who have come up here, who are not under 
any urgent necessity to take this line or that, life is 
apparently pure choice. It is quite easy to think 
we are all going to choose the pattern of life we like 
best and work it out in our own way. . . . And, 
meanwhile, there is no great hurry. . . . 

“I want to begin by saying that choice isn’t so 
easy and so necessary as it seems. We think we are 


120 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


going to choose presently, and in the end we may 
never choose at all. Choice needs perhaps more 
energy than we think. The great multitude of older 
people we can observe in the world outside there, 
haven’t chosen either in the matter of the world 
outside, where they shall go, what they shall do, 
what part they shall play, or in the matter of the 
world within, what they will be and what they are 
determined they will never be. They are still in 
much the same state of suspended choice as we seem 
to be in, but in the meanwhile things happen to them . 
And things are happening to us, things will happen 
to us, while we still suppose ourselves in the wings 
waiting to be consulted about the casting of the 
piece. . . . 

“ Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice 
which we get in the undergraduate community here, 
is not altogether illusion; it is more reality than 
illusion even if it has not the stable and complete 
reality it appears to have. And it is more a reality 
for us than it was for our fathers, and much more a 
reality now than it was a few centuries ago. The 
world is more confused and multitudinous than ever 
it was, the practicable world far wider, and ourselves 
far less under the pressure of inflexible moulding 
forces and inevitable necessities than any preceding 
generations. I want to put very clearly how I see 
the new world, the present world, the world of novel 
choice to which our youth and inexperience faces, 
and I want to define to you a certain selection of 
choices which I am going to call aristocratic, and to 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


121 


which it is our manifest duty and destiny as the 
elect and favoured sons of our race to direct our- 
selves. 

“It isn’t any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere 
alternative whether we will be, how shall I put it ? — 
the bridegrooms of pleasure or the bridegrooms of 
duty. It is infinitely vaster and more subtly moral 
than that. There are a thousand good lives possible, 
of which we may have one, lives which are soundly 
good, or a thousand bad lives, if you like, fives which 
are thoroughly bad — that’s the old and perpetual 
choice, that has always been — but what is more 
evident to me and more remarkable and disconcerting 
is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled 
fives lacking even so much moral definition, even so 
much consistency as is necessary for us to call them 
either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate 
fives, more and more of them, opening out as the 
possible fives before us, a perfect wilderness between 
salvation and damnation, a wilderness so vast and 
crowded that at last it seems as though the way to 
either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable 
futility. Such planless indeterminate fives, plebe- 
ian fives, mere fives, fill the world, and the spectacle 
of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems to me 
to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate con- 
fusion of purpose. Plain issues are harder and 
harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared. 
Simple living is the countryman come to town. We 
are deafened and jostled and perplexed. There 
are so many things afoot that we get nothing. . . . 


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THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“That is what is in my mind when I tell you that 
we have to gather ourselves together much more 
than we think. We have to clench ourselves upon 
a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together 
out of the swill of this brimming world. 

“Or — we are lost. . . 

(“Swill of this brimming world,” said White. 
“Some of this sounds uncommonly like Prothero.” 
He mused for a moment and then resumed his 
reading.) 

“That is what I was getting at when, three years 
ago, I made an attack upon Democracy to the 
mother society of this society, an attack that I 
expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is 
what I have come down now to do my best to make 
plainer. This age of confusion is Democracy ; it is 
all that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, 
if it means anything, means the rule of the planless 
man, the rule of the unkempt mind. It means as a 
necessary consequence this vast boiling up of collec- 
tively meaningless things. 

“What is the quality of the common man, I mean 
of the man that is common to all of us, the man who 
is the Standard for such men as Carnac, the man 
who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat ? 
He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses. 
He begins in blind imitation of the life about him. 
He lusts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills a field 
or toils in some other way to earn a living, a mere 
aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander, 
he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


123 


fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously defensive 
of his children and his possessions, and so until he 
wearies. Then he dies and needs a cemetery. He 
needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of dissolu- 
tion that even when he has ceased to be, he still 
wants a place and a grave to hold him together and 
prevent his returning to the All that made him. 
Our chief impression of long ages of mankind comes 
from its cemeteries. And this is the life of man, as 
the common man conceives and lives it. Beyond 
that he does not go, he never comprehends himself 
collectively at all, the state happens about him ; his 
passion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, 
makes him accumulate upon himself until he congests 
in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states 
that have no structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive 
lying and chatter of his newspapers, his hoardings 
and music-halls gives the measure of his congested 
intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty 
churches and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the 
intensity of his congested souls, the tricks and slow 
blundering dishonesties of Diet and Congress and 
Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom. . . . 

“I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead 
for pride. I say here now to you and to High Heaven 
that this life is not good enough for me. I know there 
is a better life than this muddle about us, a better 
life possible now. I know it. A better individual 
life and a better public life. If I had no other 
assurances, if I were blind to the glorious intimations 
of art, to the perpetually widening promise of science. 


124 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form and 
colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I 
should still know this from the insurgent spirit 
within me. . . . 

“Now this better life is what I mean when I talk 
of Aristocracy. This idea of a life breaking away 
from the common life to something better, is the 
consuming idea in my mind. 

“Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life 
of the farm and the shop, the inn and the market, the 
street and the crowd, is something that is not of the 
common life. Its way of thinking is Science, its 
dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind. 
It is not the common thing. But also it is not an 
unnatural thing. It is not as common as a rat, 
but it is no less natural than a panther. 

“For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be 
a potato grower, it is rarer but it is as natural ; it is 
as natural to seek explanations and arrange facts 
as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show kind- 
ness to a child. It is a folly I will not even dis- 
pute about, that man’s only natural implement is 
the spade. Imagination, pride, exalted desire are 
just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and 
sexual curiosities and the panic dread of unknown 
things. . . 

“Now you see better what I mean about choice. 
Now you see what I am driving at. We have to 
choose each one for himself and also each one for 
the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the 
common life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, 


THE BOY GROWS UP 


125 


weakly nothings, children of luck, steering our artful 
courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or 
whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it 
amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal 
quality an aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by 
fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to 
know and understand up to the hilt of his under- 
standing, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff 
of his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a 
purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not 
simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained 
by pride. Whether you or I make that choice and 
whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, 
though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a 
small matter to the world. But the great matter 
is this, that the choice is being made, that it will 
continue to be made, and that all around us, so 
that it can never be arrested and darkened again, 
is the dawn of human possibility. . . 

(White could also see his dead friend’s face with its 
enthusiastic paleness, its disordered hair and the 
glowing darknesses in the eyes. On such occasions 
Benham always had an expression of escape. Tem- 
porary escape. And thus would his hand have 
clutched the reading-desk; thus would his long 
fingers have rustled these dry papers.) 

“Man has reached a point when a new life opens 
before him. . . . 

“The old habitual life of man is breaking up all 
about us, and for the new life our minds, our imagina- 
tions, our habits and customs are all unprepared. . , y 


126 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“It is only now, after some years of study and 
living, that I begin to realize what this tremendous 
beginning we call Science means to mankind. Every 
condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, 
the manners and customs, the sentiments, the moral- 
ity, the laws and limitations which make up the 
common life, has been or is being destroyed. . . . 
Two or three hundred years more and all that life 
will be as much a thing past and done with as the 
life that was lived in the age of unpolished stone. . . . 

“Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going 
out upon the greatest adventure that ever was in 
space or time, he is doing it now, he is doing it in 
us as I stand here and read to you.” 


CHAPTER THE SECOND 
The Young Man About Town 
§1 

The oldest novel in the world at any rate, White 
reflected, was a story with a hero and no love interest 
worth talking about. It was the story of Tobias 
and how he came out from the shelters of his youth 
into this magic and intricate world. Its heroine was 
incidental, part of the spoil, a seven times relict. . . . 

White had not read the book of Tobit for many 
years, and what he was really thinking of was not 
that ancient story at all, but Botticelli's picture, 
that picture of the sunlit morning of life. Wflien 
you say “ Tobias" that is what most intelligent 
people will recall. Perhaps you will remember how 
gaily and confidently the young man strides along 
with the armoured angel by his side. Absurdly 
enough, Benham and his dream of high aristocracy 
reminded White of that. . . . 

“We have all been Tobias in our time," said 
White. 

If Wliite had been writing this chapter he would 
have in all probability called it The Tobias Stage , 
forgetful that there was no Tobit behind Benham 
and an entirely different Sara in front of him. 

12 : 


128 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


§2 

From Cambridge Benham came to London. For 
the first time he was to live in London. Never 
before had he been in London for more than a few 
days at a time. But now, guided by his mother’s 
advice, he was to have a flat in Finacue Street, just 
round the corner from Desborough Street, a flat 
very completely and delightfully furnished under 
her supervision. It had an admirable study, in 
which she had arranged not only his books, but a 
number of others in beautiful old leather bindings 
that it had amused her extremely to buy ; it had a 
splendid bureau and business-like letter-filing cabi- 
nets, a neat little drawing-room and a dining-room, 
well-placed abundant electric lights, and a man 
called Merkle whom she had selected very carefully 
and who she felt would not only see to Benham’s 
comfort but keep him, if necessary, up to the 
mark. 

This man Merkle seemed quite unaware that 
humanity “here and now” — even as he was en- 
gaged in meticulously putting out Benham’ s clothes 
— was “leaving its ancestral shelters and going out 
upon the greatest adventure that ever was in space 
or time.” If he had been- told as much by Benham 
he would probably have said, “Indeed, sir,” and 
proceeded accurately with his duties. And if Ben- 
ham’s voice had seemed to call for any additional 
remark, he would probably have added, “It’s ’igh 
time, sir, something of the sort was done. Will you 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 129 


have the white wesket as before, sir, or a fresh one 
this evening? . . . Unless it’s a very special occa- 
sion, sir. . . . Exactly, sir. Thank you, sir.” 

And when her son was properly installed in his 
apartments Lady Marayne came round one morn- 
ing with a large experienced-looking portfolio and 
rendered an account of her stewardship of his estate 
that was already some months overdue. It was all 
very confused and confusing, and there were inex- 
plicable incidents, a heavy overdraft at the bank for 
example, but this was Sir Godfrey’s fault, she ex- 
plained. “He never would help me with any of this 
business,” she said. “I’ve had to add sometimes 
for hours . But, of course, you are a man, and when 
you’ve looked through it all, I know you’ll under- 
stand.” 

He did look through it enough to see that it was 
undesirable that he should understand too explicitly, 
and, anyhow, he was manifestly very well off in- 
deed, and the circumstances of the case, even as he 
understood them, would have made any business- 
like book-keeping ungracious. The bankers sub- 
mitted the corroborating account of securities, and 
he found himself possessed of his unconditional 
six thousand a year, with, as she put it, “the world 
at his feet.” On the whole it seemed more wonder- 
ful to him now than when he had first heard of it. 
He kissed her and thanked her, and left the portfolio 
open for Merkle’s entirely honest and respectful 
but very exact inspection, and walked back with her 
to Desborough Street, and all the while he was 


130 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


craving to ask the one tremendous question he 
knew he would never ask, which was just how 
exactly this beneficent Nolan came in. . . . 

Once or twice in the small hours, and on a number 
of other occasions, this unspeakable riddle assumed 
a portentous predominance in his mind. He was 
forced back upon his inner consciousness for its 
consideration. He could discuss it with nobody 
else, because that would have been discussing his 
mother. 

Probably most young men who find themselves 
with riches at large in the world have some such 
perplexity as this mixed in with the gift. Such 
men as the Cecils perhaps not, because they are in 
the order of things, the rich young Jews perhaps 
not, because acquisition is their principle, but for 
most other intelligent inheritors there must be this 
twinge of conscientious doubt. “Why particularly 
am I picked out for so tremendous an advantage?” 
If the riddle is not Nolan, then it is rent, or it is the 
social mischief of the business, or the particular 
speculative coup that established their fortune. 

“Pecunia non olet” Benham wrote, “and it is just 
as well. Or the west-ends of the world would reek 
with deodorizers. Restitution is inconceivable ; how 
and to whom? And in the meanwhile here we are 
lifted up by our advantage to a fantastic appearance 
of opportunity. Whether the world looks to us or 
not to do tremendous things, it ought to look to us. 
And above all we ought to look to ourselves. 
Richesse oblige.” 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 131 


§3 

It is not to be supposed that Benham came to 
town only with a general theory of aristocracy. He 
had made plans for a career. Indeed, he had plans 
for several careers. None of them when brought 
into contrast with the great spectacle of London 
retained all the attractiveness that had saturated 
them at their inception. 

They were all more or less political careers. What- 
ever a democratic man may be, Prothero and he had 
decided that an aristocratic man is a public man. He 
is made and protected in what he is by laws and the 
state and his honour goes out to the state. The 
aristocrat has no right to be a voluptuary or a mere 
artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such purely 
personal things. Responsibility for the aim and 
ordering of the world is demanded from him as 
imperatively as courage. 

Benham’s deliberate assumption of the equestrian 
role brought him into contact with a new set of 
acquaintances, conscious of political destinies. They 
were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly 
unaffected ; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a 
day’s hunting, and they saw to it that BenhanTs 
manifest determination not to discredit himself 
did not lead to his breaking his neck. Their bodies 
were beautifully tempered, and their minds were as 
flabby as Prothero’s body. Among them were 
such men as Lord Breeze and Peter Westerton, and 
that current set of Corinthians who supposed them- 


132 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


selves to be resuscitating the Young England move- 
ment and Tory Democracy. Poor movements which 
indeed have never so much lived as suffered chronic 
resuscitation. These were days when Tariff Reform 
was only an inglorious possibility for the Tory Party, 
and Young England had yet to demonstrate its mental 
quality in an anti-socialist campaign. Seen from the 
perspectives of Cambridge and Chexington, the Tory 
party was still a credible basis for the adventure of a 
young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind. 

These were the days when the strain and extremity 
of a dangerous colonial war were fresh in people’s 
minds, when the quality of the public consciousness 
was braced up by its recent response to unanticipated 
demands. The conflict of stupidities that had 
caused the war was overlaid and forgotten by a 
hundred thousand devotions, by countless heroic 
deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely con- 
ceived and broadly handled. The nation had dis- 
played a belated regard for its honour and a sus- 
tained passion for great unities. It was still possible 
for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid 
opportunity, and London as the conceivable heart of 
the world. He could think of Parliament as a 
career, and of a mingling of aristocratic socialism 
based on universal service with a civilizing imperial- 
ism as a purpose. . . . 

But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than 
that. . . . 

Already when Benham came to London he had 
begun to dream of possibilities that went beyond the 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 133 


accidental states and empires of to-day. Prothero’s 
mind, replete with historical detail, could find nothing 
but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and 
loyalties of our time. “ Patched up things, Benham, 
temporary, pretentious. All very well for the un- 
dignified man, the democratic man, to take shelter 
under, all very well for the humourist to grin and 
bear, all very well for the crowd and the quack, but 
not for the aristocrat — No! — his mind cuts like steel 
and burns like fire. Lousy sheds they are, plastered 
hoardings . . . and such a damned nuisance too ! 
For any one who wants to do honourable things ! 
With their wars and their diplomacies, their tariffs 
and their encroachments ; all their humbugging 
struggles, their bloody and monstrous struggles, 
that finally work out to no end at all. . . . If you 
are going for the handsome thing in life then the 
world has to be a united world, Benham, as a matter 
of course. That was settled when the railways and 
the telegraph came. Telephones, wireless teleg- 
raphy, aeroplanes insist on it. We’ve got to 
mediatise all this stuff, all these little crowns and 
boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand in the 
way. Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all 
the rotten little dukes and princes and republics, just 
as Germany had to be united in spite of its scores of 
kingdoms and duchies and liberties, so now the world. 
Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politi- 
cians and court people and — douaniers ; they may 
suit the loan-mongers and the armaments share- 
holders, they may even be more comfortable for 


134 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

the middle-aged, but what, except as an inconven- 
ience, does that matter to you or me ? 

Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept 
away empires. There was always a point when the 
rhetoric broke into gesture. 

“ We’ve got to sweep them away, Benham,” he 
said, with a wide gesture of his arm. “We’ve got 
to sweep them all away.” 

Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, 
and spoke hastily, because he was afraid some one 
else might begin. lie was never safe from inter- 
ruption in his own room. The other young men 
present sucked at their pipes and regarded him 
doubtfully. They were never quite certain whether 
Prothero was a prophet or a fool. They could not un- 
derstand a mixed type, and he was so manifestly both. 

“The only sane political work for an intelligent 
man is to get the world-state ready. For that we 
have to prepare an aristocracy — ” 

“Your world-state will be aristocratic?” some one 
interpolated. 

“Of course it will be aristocratic. How can 
uninformed men think all round the globe ? Democ- 
racy dies five miles from the parish pump. It will 
be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in 
the world. . . .” 

“Of course,” he added, pipe in mouth, as he 
poured out his whiskey, “it’s a big undertaking. 
It’s an affair of centuries. . . .” 

And then, as a further afterthought: “All the 
more reason for getting to work at it. . . 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 135 


In his moods of inspiration Prothero would dis- 
course through the tobacco smoke until that great 
world-state seemed imminent — and Part Two in 
the Tripos a thing relatively remote. He would 
talk until the dimly-lit room about him became 
impalpable, and the young men squatting about it 
in elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of 
cities that are still to be, bridges in wild places, 
deserts tamed and oceans conquered, mankind no 
longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the 
conquest of the stars. . . . 

An aristocratic world-state ; this political dream 
had already taken hold of Benham’s imagination 
when he came to town. But it was a dream, some- 
thing that had never existed, something that indeed 
may never materialize, and such dreams, though 
they are vivid enough in a study at night, fade and 
vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper or the 
sound of a passing band. To come back again. . . . 
So it was with Benham. Sometimes he was set 
clearly towards this world-state that Prothero had 
talked into possibility. Sometimes he was simply 
abreast of the patriotic and socially constructive 
British Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton. And 
there were moods when the two things were confused 
in his mind, and the glamour of world dominion 
rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British 
Empire of Edward the Seventh — and Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a 
time honestly entertaining both these projects in his 
mind, each at its different level, the greater impab 


136 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


pable one and the lesser concrete one within it. In 
some unimaginable way he could suppose that the 
one by some miracle of ennoblement — and neglect- 
ing the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the 
American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, 
the greater part of mankind from the problem — 
might become the other. . . . 

All of which is recorded here, without excess of 
comment, as it happened, and as, in a mood of 
astonished reminiscences, he came finally to perceive 
it, and set it down for White’s meditative perusal. 

§4 

But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have 
something of the substance of reality and realities, 
something of the magic of dreams. The London to 
which Benham came from Cambridge and the dis- 
quisitions of Prothero was not the London of a 
mature and disillusioned vision. It was London 
seen magnified and distorted through the young 
man’s crystalline intentions. It had for him a 
quality of multitudinous, unquenchable activity. 
Himself filled with an immense appetite for life, he 
was unable to conceive of London as fatigued. He 
could not suspect these statesmen he now began to 
meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty spites, he 
imagined that all the important and influential persons 
in this large world of affairs were as frank in their 
private lives and as unembarrassed in their finan- 
cial relationships as his untainted self. And he had 
still to reckon with stupidity. He believed in the 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 137 

statecraft of leader-writers and the sincerity of 
political programmes. And so regarded, what an 
avenue to Empire was Whitehall ! How momentous 
was the sunrise in St. James’s Park, and how signifi- 
cant the clustering knot of listeners and speakers be- 
neath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to the 
windy sky ! 

For a time Benham was in love with the idea of 
London. He got maps of London and books about 
London. He made plans to explore its various re- 
gions. He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious 
picturesqueness of its garden suburbs to the factories 
of Croydon, from the clerk-villadoms of Ealing to 
the inky streams of Bow. In those days there were 
passenger steamboats that would take one from the 
meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle 
of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the 
towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals 
of the sea. . . . His time was far too occupied for 
him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had 
planned, but he had many walks that bristled with 
impressions. Northward and southward, eastward 
and westward a dreaming young man could wander 
into a wilderness of population, polite or sombre, poor, 
rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all 
urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the 
drama of the coming years. He loved the late after- 
noon, when every artery is injected and gorged with 
the multitudinous home-going of the daily workers, 
he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering 
excitements of the late hours. And he went out 


138 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


southward and eastward into gaunt regions of reeking 
toil. As yet he knew nothing of the realities of 
industrialism. He saw only the beauty of the great 
chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred 
sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid 
shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks 
of brickwork and lit the emptiness of strange and 
slovenly streets. . . . 

And this London was only the foreground of the 
great scene upon which he, as a prosperous, well- 
befriended young Englishman, was free to play what- 
ever part he could. This narrow turbid tidal river 
by which he walked ran out under the bridges east- 
ward beneath the grey-blue clouds towards Germany, 
towards Russia, and towards Asia, which still seemed 
in those days so largely the Englishman’s Asia. And 
when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this 
sense of the round world was so upon you that you 
faced not merely Westminster, but the icy Atlantic 
and America, which one could yet fancy was a land 
of Englishmen — Englishmen a little estranged. At 
any rate they assimilated, they kept the tongue. 
The shipping in the lower reaches below the Tower 
there carried the flags of every country under the 
sky. ... As he went along the riverside he met a 
group of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese. 
Cambridge had abounded in Indians, and beneath 
that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed as 
though the world might centre. The background of 
the Englishman’s world reached indeed to either 
pole, it went about the earth, his background it was 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 139 


— for all that he was capable of doing. All this 
had awaited him. . . . 

Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable 
imagination came at times to the pitch of audible 
threats ? If the extreme indulgence of his opportu- 
nity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his 
vanity at moments to the kingly pitch? If he 
ejaculated and made a gesture or so as he went 
along the Embankment ? 


§5 

In the disquisition upon choice that opened Ben- 
ham’s paper on Aristocracy , he showed himself 
momentarily wiser than his day-dreams. For in 
these day-dreams he did seem to himself to be 
choosing among unlimited possibilities. Yet while 
he dreamt other influences were directing his move- 
ments. There were for instance his mother, Lady 
Marayne, who saw a very different London from 
what he did, and his mother Dame Nature, who can- 
not see London at all. She was busy in his blood 
as she is busy in the blood of most healthy young 
men ; common experience must fill the gaps for 
us ; and patiently and thoroughly she was preparing 
for the entrance of that heroine, whom not the most 
self-centred of heroes can altogether avoid. . . . 

And then there was the power of every day. 
Benham imagined himself at large on his liberating 
steed of property while indeed he was mounted on 
the made horse of Civilization ; while he was specu- 
lating whither he should go, he was already starting 


140 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


out upon the round. One hesitates upon the magnifi- 
cent plan and devotion of one’s lifetime and mean- 
while there is usage, there are engagements. Every 
morning came Merkle, the embodiment of the estab- 
lished routine, the herald of all that the world ex- 
pected and required Benham to be and do. Usually 
he awakened Benham with the opening of his 
door and the soft tinkle of the curtain rings as he 
let in the morning light. He moved softly about 
the room, gathering up and removing the crumpled 
hulls of yesterday ; that done he reappeared at the 
bedside with a cup of admirable tea and one thin 
slice of bread-and-butter, reported on the day’s 
weather, stood deferential for instructions. “You 
will be going out for lunch, sir. Very good, sir. 
White slips of course, sir. You will go down into 
the country in the afternoon ? Will that be the serge 
suit, sir, or the brown?” 

These matters settled, the new aristocrat could 
yawn and stretch like any aristocrat under the old 
dispensation, and then as the sound of running 
water from the bathroom ceased, stick his toes out 
of bed. 

The day was tremendously indicated. World- 
states and aristocracies of steel and fire, things 
that were as real as coal-scuttles in Billy’s rooms 
away there at Cambridge, were now remoter than 
Sirius. 

He was expected to shave, expected to bath, 
expected to go in to the bright warmth and white 
linen and silver and china of his breakfast-table. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 141 

And there he found letters and invitations, loaded 
with expectation. And beyond the coffee-pot, neatly 
folded, lay the Times , and the Daily News and the 
Telegraph all with an air of requiring his attention. 
There had been more fighting in Thibet and Mr. 
Ritchie had made a Free Trade speech at Croydon. 
The Japanese had torpedoed another Russian iron- 
clad and a British cruiser was ashore in the East 
Indies. A man had been found murdered in an 
empty house in Hoxton and the King had had a 
conversation with General Booth. Tadpole was in 
for North Winchelsea, beating Taper by nine votes, 
and there had been a new cut in the Atlantic passen- 
ger rates. He was expected to be interested and 
excited by these things. 

Presently the telephone bell would ring and he 
would hear the clear little voice of his mother full of 
imperative expectations. He would be round for 
lunch? Yes, he would be round to lunch. And the 
afternoon, had he arranged to do anything with his 
afternoon? No! — put off Chexington until to- 
morrow. There was this new pianist, it was really 
an experience , and one might not get tickets again. 
And then tea at Panton’s. It was rather fun 
at Panton’s. . . . Oh! — Weston Massinghay was 
coming to lunch. He was a useful man to know. 
So clever. ... So long, my dear little Son, till 
I see you. . . . 

So life puts out its Merkle threads, as the poacher 
puts his hair noose about the pheasant’s neck, and 
while we theorize takes hold of us. . . . 


142 


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It came presently home to Benham that he had 
been down from Cambridge for ten months, and 
that he was still not a step forward with the realiza- 
tion of the new aristocracy. His political career 
waited. He had done a quantity of things, but 
their net effect was incoherence. He had not been 
merely passive, but his efforts to break away into 
creative realities had added to rather than diminished 
his accumulating sense of futility. 

The natural development of his position under the 
influence of Lady Marayne had enormously enlarged 
the circle of his acquaintances. He had taken part 
in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and listened to 
a representative selection of political and literary and 
social personages, he had been several times to the 
opera and to a great number and variety of plays, he 
had been attentively inconspicuous in several really 
good week-end parties. He had spent a golden 
October in North Italy with his mother, and 
escaped from the glowing lassitude of Venice for 
some days of climbing in the Eastern Alps. In 
January, in an outbreak of enquiry, he had gone 
with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and had eaten 
zakuska, brightened his eyes with vodka, talked 
with a number of charming people of the war that 
was then imminent, listened to gipsy singers until 
dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent and 
stately of capitals, and returned with Lionel, dis- 
coursing upon autocracy and assassination, Japan, 
the Russian destiny, and the government of Peter 
the Great. That excursion was the most after his 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 143 


heart of all the dispersed employments of his first 
year. Through the rest of the winter he kept himself 
very fit, and still further qualified that nervous dis- 
like for the horse that he had acquired from Prothero 
by hunting once a week in Essex. He was incurably 
a bad horseman ; he rode without sympathy, he was 
unready and convulsive at hedges and ditches, and 
he judged distances badly. His white face and rigid 
seat and a certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle 
earned him the singular nickname, which never 
reached his ears, of the “ Galvanized Corpse.” He 
got through, however, at the cost of four quite 
trifling spills and without damaging either of the 
horses he rode. And his physical self-respect in- 
creased. 

On his writing-desk appeared a few sheets of 
manuscript that increased only very slowly. He 
was trying to express his Cambridge view of aris- 
tocracy in terms of Finacue Street, West. 

The artistic and intellectual movements of Lon- 
don had made their various demands upon his time 
and energies. Art came to him with a noble assump- 
tion of his interest and an intention that presently 
became unpleasantly obvious to sell him pictures 
that he did not want to buy and explain away pictures 
that he did. He bought one or two modern achieve- 
ments, and began to doubt if art and aristocracy 
had any necessary connection. At first he had 
accepted the assumption that they had. After all, 
he reflected, one lives rather for life and things than 
for pictures of life and things or pictures arising out 


144 


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of life and things. This Art had an air of saying 
something, but when one came to grips with it 
what had it to say? Unless it was Yah! The 
drama, and more particularly the intellectual drama, 
challenged his attention. In the hands of Shaw, 
Barker, Masefield, Galsworthy, and Hankin, it, too, 
had an air of saying something, but he found it 
extremely difficult to join on to his own demands 
upon life anything whatever that the intellectual 
drama had the air of having said. He would sit 
forward in the front row of the dress-circle with his 
cheek on his hand and his brow slightly knit. His 
intentness amused observant people. The drama 
that did not profess to be intellectual he went to 
with Lady Marayne, and usually on first nights. 
Lady Marayne loved a big first night at St. James’s 
Theatre or His Majesty’s. Afterwards, perhaps, 
Sir Godfrey would join them at a supper party, and 
all sorts of clever and amusing people would be there 
saying keen intimate things about each other. He 
met Yeats, who told amusing stories about George 
Moore, and afterwards he met George Moore, who 
told amusing stories about Yeats, and it was all, he 
felt, great fun for the people who were in it. But 
he was not in it, and he had no very keen desire to be 
in it. It wasn’t his stuff. He had, though they were 
nowadays rather at the back of his mind, quite 
other intentions. In the meanwhile all these things 
took up his time and distracted his attention. 

There was, as yet, no practicable aviation to 
beguile a young man of spirit, but there were times 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 145 


when Benham found himself wondering whether 
there might not be something rather creditable 
in the possession and control of a motor-car of excep- 
tional power. Only one might smash people up. 
Should an aristocrat be deterred by the fear of smash- 
ing people up? If it is a selfish fear of smashing 
people up, if it is nerves rather than pity? At any 
rate it did not come to the car. 

§ 6 

Among other things that delayed Benham very 
greatly in the development of his aristocratic experi- 
ments was the advice that was coming to him from 
every quarter. It came in extraordinary variety and 
volume, but always it had one unvarying feature. It 
ignored and tacitly contradicted his private inten- 
tions. 

We are all of us disposed to be propagandists of our 
way of living, and the spectacle of a wealthy young 
man quite at large is enough to excite the most 
temperate of us without distinction of age or sex. 
“If I were you/’ came to be a familiar phrase in his 
ear. This was particularly the case with political 
people ; and they did it not only from the natural 
infirmity of humanity, but because, when they 
seemed reluctant or. satisfied with him as he was, 
Lady Marayne egged them on. 

There was a general assumption that he was 
to go into Parliament, and most of his counsellors 
assumed further that on the whole his natural 
sympathies would take him into the Conservative 


146 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


party. But it was pointed out to him that just at 
present the Liberal party was the party of a young 
man’s opportunity ; sooner or later the swing of the 
pendulum which would weed the Conservatives and 
proliferate Liberals was bound to come, there was 
always more demand and opportunity for candidates 
on the Liberal side, the Tariff Reformers were 
straining their ministerial majority to the splitting 
point, and most of the old Liberal leaders had 
died off during the years of exile. The party was no 
longer dominated ; it would tolerate ideas. A young 
man who took a distinctive line — provided it was 
not from the party point of view a vexatious or 
impossible line — might go very rapidly far and 
high. On the other hand, it was urged upon him 
that the Tariff Reform adventure called also for 
youth and energy. But there, perhaps, there was 
less scope for the distinctive line — and already 
they had Garvin. Quite a number of Benham’s 
friends pointed out to him the value of working 
out some special aspect of our national political 
interests. A very useful speciality was the Balkans. 
Mr. Pope, the vrell-known publicist, whose very 
sound and considerable reputation was based on 
the East Purblow Labour Experiment, met Benham 
at lunch and proposed to go with him in a spirit 
of instructive association to the Balkans, rub 
up their Greek together, and settle the problem of 
Albania. He wanted, he said, a foreign speciality 
to balance his East Purblow interest. But/ Lady 
Beach Mandarin warned Benham against the Bal- 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 147 


kans ; the Balkans were getting to be too handy for 
Easter and summer holidays, and now that there 
were several good hotels in Servia and Montenegro 
and Sofia, they were being overdone. Everybody 
went to the Balkans and came back with a pet na- 
tionality. She loathed pet nationalities. She be- 
lieved most people loathed them nowadays. It was 
stale : it was Gladstonian. She was all for specializa- 
tion in social reform. She thought Benham ought 
to join the Fabian Society and consult the Webbs. 
Quite a number of able young men had been placed 
with the assistance of the Webbs. They were, 
she said, “ a perfect fount. . . .” Two other people, 
independently of each other, pointed out to Benham 
the helpfulness of a few articles in the half-crown 
monthlies. . . . 

“ What are the assumptions underlying all this?” 
Benham asked himself in a phase of lucidity. 

And after reflection. “Good God! The assump- 
tions! What do they think will satisfy me? . . .” 

Everybody, however, did not point to Parliament. 
Several people seemed to think Travel, with a 
large T, was indicated. One distant cousin of Sir 
Godfrey’s, the kind of man of the world who has 
long moustaches, was for big game shooting. “Get 
right out of all this while you are young,” he said. 
“There’s nothing to compare with stopping a charg- 
ing lion at twenty yards. I’ve done it, my boy. 
You can come back for all this pow-wow afterwards.” 
He gave the diplomatic service as a second choice. 
“There you are,” he said, “first-rate social position, 


148 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


nothing to do, theatres, operas, pretty women, colour, 
life. The best of good times. Barring Washington, 
that is. But Washington, they say, isn't as bad as it 
used to be — since Teddy has Europeanized 'em. ..." 

Even the Reverend Harold Benham took a sub- 
dued but thoughtful share in his son's admonition. 
He came up to the flat — due precautions were 
taken to prevent a painful encounter — he lunched 
at his son's new club, and he was visibly oppressed 
by the contrast between the young man's youthful 
fortunes and his own. As visibly he bore up bravely. 
“ There are few men, Poff, who would not envy 
you your opportunities," he said. “You have the 
Feast of Life spread out at your feet. ... I hope 
you have had yourself put up for the Athenaeum. 
They say it takes years. When I was a young 
man — and ambitious — I thought that some day I 
might belong to the Athenaeum. . . . One has to 
learn. . . ." 

§7 

And with an effect of detachment, just as though 
it didn't belong to the rest of him at all, there was 
beginning a sort of backstairs and underside to 
Benham's life. There is no need to discuss how 
inevitable that may or may not be in the case of a 
young man of spirit and large means, nor to embark 
upon the discussion of the temptations and oppor- 
tunities of large cities. Several ladies, of various 
positions and qualities, had reflected upon his mani- 
fest need of education. There was in particular Mrs. 
Skelmersdale, a very pretty little widow with hazel 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 149 

eyes, black hair, a mobile mouth, and a pathetic 
history, who talked of old music to him and took 
him to a Dolmetsch concert in Clifford’s Inn, and 
expanded that common interest to a general par- 
ticipation in his indefinite outlook. She advised 
him about his probable politics — everybody did 
that — but when he broke through his usual reserve 
and suggested views of his own, she was extraordi- 
narily sympathetic. She was so sympathetic and in 
such a caressing way that she created a temporary 
belief in her understanding, and it was quite im- 
perceptibly that he was drawn into the discussion of 
modern ethical problems. She herself was a rather 
stimulating instance of modern ethical problems, 
fehe told him something of her own story, and then 
their common topics narrowed down very abruptly. 
He found he could help her in several ways. There 
is, unhappily, a disposition on the part of many 
people, who ought to know better, to regard a role 
played by Joseph during his earlier days in Egypt 
as a ridiculous one. This point of view became 
very inopportunely dominant in Benham’s mind 
when he was lunching t$te d tdte with Mrs. Skelmers- 
dale at her flat. . . . 

The ensuing intimacy was of an entirely concealed 
and respectable nature, but a certain increased pre- 
occupation in his manner set Lady Marayne thinking. 
He had as a matter of fact been taken by surprise. 

Still he perceived that it is no excuse for a man 
that he has been taken by surprise. Surprises in 
one’s own conduct ought not to happen. When 


150 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


they do happen then an aristocrat ought to stick 
to what he had done. He was now in a subtle and 
complicated relationship to Mrs. Skelmersdale, a 
relationship in which her pride had become suddenly 
a matter of tremendous importance. Once he had 
launched himself upon this affair, it was clear to 
him that he owed it to her never to humiliate her. 
And to go back upon himself now would be a tremen- 
dous humiliation for her. You see, he had helped 
her a little financially. And she looked to him, she 
wanted him. . . . 

She wasn’t, he knew, altogether respectable. 
Indeed, poor dear, her ethical problems, already a 
little worn, made her seem at times anything but 
respectable. He had met her first one evening at 
Jimmy Gluckstein’s when he was forming his opinion 
of Art. Her manifest want of interest in pictures 
had attracted him. And that had led to music. 
And to the mention of a Clementi piano, that short, 
gentle, sad, old, little sort of piano people will insist 
upon calling a spinet, in her flat. 

And so to this. . . . 

It was very wonderful and delicious, this first 
indulgence of sense. 

It was shabby and underhand. 

The great god Pan is a glorious god. (And so 
was Swinburne.) And what can compare with the 
warmth of blood and the sheen of sunlit limbs ? 

But Priapus. . . . 

She was the most subtle, delightful and tender of 
created beings. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 151 


She had amazing streaks of vulgarity. 

And some astonishing friends. 

Once she had seemed to lead the talk deliberately 
to money matters. 

She loved him and desired him. There was no 
doubt of it. 

There was a curious effect about her as though 
when she went round the corner she would become 
somebody else. And a curious recurrent feeling that 
round the corner there was somebody else. 

He had an extraordinary feeling that his mother 
knew about this business. This feeling came from 
nothing in her words or acts, but from some inde- 
finable change in her eyes and bearing towards him. 
But how could she know? 

It was unlikely that she and Mrs. Skelmersdale 
would ever meet, and it seemed to him that it would 
be a particularly offensive incident for them to meet. 

There were times now when life took on a grey and 
boring quality such as it had never had before he met 
Mrs. Skelmersdale, and the only remedy was to go 
to her. She could restore his nervous tranquillity, 
his feeling of solidity and reality, his pride in himself. 
For a time, that is. 

Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by 
the feeling that he ought not to have been taken by 
surprise. 

And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that 
if now he could be put back again to the day before 
that lunch. . . . 

No ! he should not have gone there to lunch. 


152 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


He had gone there to see her Clementi piano. 

Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any 
other possibility ? 

On a point so vital his memory was curiously 
unsure. 


§8 

The worry and disorganization of Benham’s life 
and thoughts increased as the spring advanced. 
His need in some way to pull things together became 
overpowering. He began to think of Billy Prothero, 
more and more did it seem desirable to have a big 
talk with Billy and place everything that had got 
disturbed. Benham thought of going to Cambridge 
for a week of exhaustive evenings. Small engage- 
ments delayed that expedition. . . . 

Then came a day in April when all the world 
seemed wrong to Benham. He was irritable; his 
will was unstable; whatever presented itself to be 
done presented itself as undesirable ; he could settle 
to nothing. He had been keeping away from Mrs. 
Skelmersdale and in the morning there came a little 
note from her designed to correct this abstention. 
She understood the art of the attractive note. But 
he would not decide to go to her. He left the note 
unanswered. 

Then came his mother at the telephone and it 
became instantly certain to Benham that he could 
not play the dutiful son that evening. He answered 
her that he could not come to dinner. He had 
engaged himself. ‘ ‘ Where ? ’ ’ 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 153 


“With some men.” 

There was a pause and then his mother’s voice 
came, flattened by disappointment. “Very well 
then, little Poff. Perhaps I shall see you to-morrow.” 

Pie replaced the receiver and fretted back into his 
study, where the notes on aristocracy lay upon his 
desk, the notes he had been pretending to work over 
all the morning. 

“Damned liar !” he said, and then, “Dirty liar!” 

He decided to lunch at the club, and in the after- 
noon he was moved to telephone an appointment with 
his siren. And having done that he was bound to 
keep it. 

About one o’clock in the morning he found himself 
walking back to Finacue Street. He was no longer 
a fretful conflict of nerves, but if anything he was 
less happy than he had been before. It seemed to 
him that London was a desolate and inglorious 
growth. 

London ten years ago was much less nocturnal 
than it is now. And not so brightly lit. Down 
the long streets came no traffic but an occasional 
hansom. Here and there a cat halted or bolted in 
the road. Near Piccadilly a policeman hovered 
artfully in a doorway, and then came a few belated 
prostitutes waylaying the passers-by, and a few 
youths and men, wearily lust driven. 

As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure 
that struck him as familiar. Surely ! — it was Billy 
Prothero ! Or at any rate it was astonishingly like 
Billy Prothero. He glanced again and the likeness 


154 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


was more doubtful. The man had his back to 
Benham, he was halting and looking back at a 
woman. 

By some queer flash of intuition it came to Benham 
that even if this was not Prothero, still Prothero did 
these things. It might very well be Prothero even, 
though, as he now saw, it wasn’t. Everybody did 
these things. . . . 

It came into Benham’s head for the first time that 
life could be tiresome. 

This Bond Street was a tiresome place; with its 
shops all shut and muffled, its shops where in the 
crowded daytime one bought costly furniture, costly 
clothes, costly scent, sweets, bibelots, pictures, 
jewellery, presents of all sorts, clothes for Mrs. 
Skelmersdale, sweets for Mrs. Skelmersdale, presents 
for Mrs. Skelmersdale, all the elaborate fittings and 
equipage of — that ! 

“Good night, dear,” a woman drifted by him. 

“I’ve said good night,” he cried, “I’ve said good 
night,” and so went on to his flat. The unquench- 
able demand, the wearisome insatiability of sex! 
When everything else has gone, then it shows itself 
bare in the bleak small hours. And at first it had 
seemed so light a matter ! He went to bed, feeling 
dog-tired, he went to bed at an hour and with a 
finished completeness that Merkle would have 
regarded as entirely becoming in a young gentleman 
of his position. 

And a little past three o’clock in the morning he 
awoke to a mood of indescribable desolation. He 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 155 


awoke with a start to an agony of remorse and self- 
reproach. 


§9 

For a time he lay quite still staring at the dark- 
ness, then he groaned and turned over. Then, 
suddenly, like one who fancies he hears a strange 
noise, he sat up in bed and listened. 

“Oh, God !” he said at last. 

And then: “Oh! The dirtiness of life! The 
dirty muddle of life ! 

“What are we doing with life? What are we all 
doing with life? 

“It isn’t only this poor Milly business. This 
only brings it to a head. Of course she wants 
money. . . .” 

His thoughts came on again. 

“But the ugliness ! 

“Why did I begin it?” 

He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his 
eyes against the backs of his hands and so re- 
mained very still, a blankness beneath his own 
question. 

After a long interval his mind moved again. 

And now it was as if he looked upon his whole 
existence, he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold 
comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless 
activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements 
that had followed his coming to London. He saw 
it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of play- 
things and undisciplined desires, as a succession of 


7 


156 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


days that began amiably and weakly, that became 
steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial 
occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and 
uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persua- 
sion, which only freshly soiled youth can feel in its 
extreme intensity, that life was slipping away from 
him, that the sands were running out, that in a little 
while his existence would be irretrievably lost. 

By some trick of the imagination he saw life as an 
interminable Bond Street, lit up by night lamps, 
desolate, full of rubbish, full of the very best rubbish, 
trappings, temptations, and down it all he drove, as 
the damned drive, wearily, inexplicably. 

What are we up to with life ! What are we making 
of life ! 

But hadn’t he intended to make something 
tremendous of life? Hadn’t he come to London 
trailing a glory? . . . 

He began to remember it as a project. It was the 
project of a great World-State sustained by an 
aristocracy of noble men. He was to have been one 
of those men, too fine and far-reaching for the dull 
manoeuvres of such politics as rule the world to-day. 
The project seemed still large, still whitely noble, 
but now it was unlit and dead, and in the foreground 
he sat in the flat of Mrs. Skelmersdale, feeling dis- 
sipated and fumbling with his white tie. And she 
was looking tired. “God!” he said. “How did I 
get there?” 

And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the 
darkness and prayed aloud to the silences. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 157 


“Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give 
me back my visions !” 

He could have imagined he heard a voice calling 
upon him to come out into life, to escape from the 
body of this death. But it was his own voice that 
called to him. . . . 

§10 

The need for action became so urgent in him, that 
he got right out of his bed and sat on the edge of it. 
Something had to be done at once. He did not know 
what it was but he felt that there could be no more 
sleep, no more rest, no dressing nor eating nor going 
forth before he came to decisions. Christian before 
his pilgrimage began was not more certain of this 
need of flight from the life of routine and vanities. 

What was to be done? 

In the first place he must get away and think about 
it all, think himself clear of all these — these im- 
mediacies, these associations and relations and holds 
and habits. He must get back to his vision, get 
back to the God in his vision. And to do that he 
must go alone. 

He was clear he must go alone. It was useless to 
go to Prothero, one weak man going to a weaker. 
Prothero he was convinced could help him not at all, 
and the strange thing is that this conviction had 
come to him and had established itself incontestably 
because of that figure at the street corner, which 
had for just one moment resembled Prothero. By 
some fantastic intuition Benham knew that Prothero 


158 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


would not only participate but excuse. And he 
knew that he himself could endure no excuses. 
He must cut clear of any possibility of qualification. 
This thing had to be stopped. He must get away, he 
must get free, he must get clean. In the extrava- 
gance of his reaction Benham felt that he could 
endure nothing but solitary places and to sleep under 
the open sky. 

He wanted to get right away from London and 
everybody and lie in the quiet darkness and stare 
up at the stars. 

His plans grew so definite that presently he was 
in his dressing-gown and turning out the maps in 
the lower drawer of his study bureau. He would 
go down into Surrey with a knapsack, wander along 
the North Downs until the Guildford gap was reached, 
strike across the Weald country to the South Downs 
and then beat eastward. The very thought of it 
brought a coolness to his mind. He knew that over 
those southern hills one could be as lonely as in the 
wilderness and as free to talk to God. And there he 
would settle something. He would make a plan 
for his life and end this torment. 

When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was 
fast asleep. 

The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham. 
He turned his head over, stared for a moment and 
then remembered. 

“ Merkle , ” he said, “I am going for a walking tour. 
I am going off this morning. Haven’t I a rucksack ? ” 

“You ? ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 159 


to it,” said Merkle. “Will you be needing the very 
’eavy boots with ’obnails — Swiss, I fancy, sir — 
or your ordinary shooting boots?” 

“And when may I expect you back, sir?” asked 
Merkle as the moment for departure drew near. 

“God knows,” said Benham, “I don’t.” 

“Then will there be any address for forwarding 
letters, sir?” 

Benham hadn’t thought of that. For a moment 
he regarded Merkle’s scrupulous respect with a 
transient perplexity. 

“HI let you know, Merkle,” he said. “I’ll let 
you know.” 

For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, 
engagements, all this fuss and clamour about 
nothing, should clamour for him in vain. . . . 

§11 

“But how closely,” cried White, in a mood of 
cultivated enthusiasm; “how closely must all the 
poor little stories that we tell to-day follow in the 
footsteps of the Great Exemplars ! A little while 
ago and the springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated 
the page. Now see ! it is Christian — .” 

Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Ben- 
ham went up across the springy turf from Epsom 
Downs station towards the crest of the hill. Was he 
not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the 
City of Destruction? Was he not also seeking that 
better city whose name is Peace ? And there was a 
bundle on his back. It was the bundle, I think, that 


160 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


seized most firmly upon the too literary imagina- 
tion of White. 

But the analogy of the bundle was a superficial 
one. Benham had not the slightest desire to lose it 
from his shoulders. It would have inconvenienced 
him very greatly if he had done so. It did not con- 
tain his sins. Our sins nowadays are not so easily 
separated. It contained a light, warm cape-coat 
he had bought in Switzerland and which he intended 
to wrap about him when he slept under the stars, 
and in addition Merkle had packed it with his silk 
pyjamas, an extra pair of stockings, tooth-brush, 
brush and comb, a safety razor. . . . And there were 
several sheets of the Ordnance map. 

§12 

The urgency of getting away from something 
dominated Benham to the exclusion of any thought of 
what he might be getting to. That muddle of his 
London life had to be left behind. First, escape. . . . 

Over the downs great numbers of larks were 
singing. It was warm April that year and early. 
All the cloud stuff in the sky was gathered into great 
towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was blue 
of the intensest. The air was so clean that Benham 
felt it clean in the substance of his body. The 
chestnuts down the hill to the right were flowering, 
the beeches were luminously green, and the oaks in 
the valley foaming gold. And sometimes it was one 
lark filled his ears, and sometimes he seemed to be 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 161 


hearing all the larks for miles about him. Presently 
over the crest he would be out of sight of the grand 
stand and the men exercising horses, and that brace 
of red-jacketed golfers. . . . 

What was he to do ? 

For a time he could think of nothing to do except 
to keep up and out of the valley. His whole being 
seemed to have come to his surfaces to look out at 
the budding of the year and hear the noise of the 
birds. And then he got into a long road from which 
he had to escape, and trespassing southward through 
plantations he reached the steep edge of the hills 
and sat down over above a great chalk pit some- 
where near Dorking and surveyed all the tumbled 
wooded spaces of the Weald. ... It is after all 
not so great a country this Sussex, nor so hilly, 
from deepest valley to highest crest is not six hundred 
feet, yet what a greatness of effect it can achieve ! 
There is something in those downland views which, 
like sea views, lifts a mind out to the skies. All 
England it seemed was there to Benham’s vision, 
and the purpose of the English, and his own purpose 
in the world. For a long time he surveyed the large 
delicacy of the detail before him, the crests, the tree- 
protected houses, the fields and farmsteads, the 
distant gleams of water. And then he became 
interested in the men who were working in the chalk 
pit down below. 

They at any rate were not troubled with the 
problem of what to do with their lives. 


162 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


§ 13 

Benham found his mind was now running clear, and 
so abundantly that he could scarcely, he felt, keep 
pace with it. As he thought his flow of ideas was 
tinged with a fear that he might forget what he was 
thinking. In an instant, for the first time in his 
mental existence, he could have imagined he had 
discovered Labour and seen it plain. A little while 
ago and he had seemed a lonely man among the 
hills, but indeed he was not lonely, these men had 
been with him all the time, and he was free to wan- 
der, to sit here, to think and choose simply because 
those men down there were not free. He was spend- 
ing their leisure. ... Not once but many times 
with Prothero had he used the phrase Richesse 
oblige. Now he remembered it. He began to 
remember a mass of ideas that had been overlaid 
and stifling within him. This was what Merkle 
and the club servants and the entertainments and 
engagements and his mother and the artistic touts 
and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the 
elaboration of games and — Mrs. Skelmersdale 
and all that had clustered thickly round him in 
London had been hiding from him. Those men 
below there had not been trusted to choose their 
work; they had been given it. And he had been 
trusted. . . . 

And now to grapple with it ! Now to get it clear ! 
What work was he going to do? That settled, 
he would deal with his distractions readily enough. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 163 


Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to 
every passing breeze of invitation. 

“What work am I going to do? What work am 
I going to do?” He repeated it. 

It is the only question for the aristocrat. What 
amusement ? That for a footman on holiday. That 
for a silly child, for any creature that is kept or 
led or driven. That perhaps for a tired invalid, for 
a toiler worked to a rag. But able-bodied amuse- 
ment ! The arms of Mrs. Skelmersdale were no 
worse than the solemn aimlessness of hunting, and 
an evening of dalliance not an atom more repre- 
hensible than an evening of chatter. It was the 
waste of him that made the sin. His life in London 
had been of a piece together. It was well that his 
intrigue had set a light on it, put a point to it, given 
him this saving crisis of the nerves. That, indeed, 
is the chief superiority of idle love-making over other 
more prevalent forms of idleness and self-indulgence ; 
it does at least bear its proper label. It is reprehen- 
sible. It brings your careless honour to the challenge 
of concealment and shabby evasions and lies. . . . 

But in this pellucid air things took their proper 
proportions again. 

And now what was he to do ? 

“ Politics, ” he said aloud to the turf and the sky. 

Is there any other work for an aristocratic man? 
. . . Science? One could admit science in that 
larger sense that sweeps in History, or Philosophy. 
Beyond that whatever work there is is work for 
which men are paid. Art? Art is nothing aristo- 


164 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


cratic except when it is a means of scientific or philo- 
sophical expression. Art that does not argue nor 
demonstrate nor discover is merely the craftsman’s 
impudence. 

He pulled up at this and reflected for a time with 
some distinguished instances in his mind. They 
were so distinguished, so dignified, they took their 
various arts with so admirable a gravity that the 
soul of this young man recoiled from the verdicts to 
which his reasoning drove him. “It’s not for me 
to judge them,” he decided, “except in relation to 
myself. For them there maybe tremendous signifi- 
cances in Art. But if these do not appear to me, 
then so far as I am concerned they do not exist for 
me. They are not in my world. So far as they 
attempt to invade me and control my attitudes or 
my outlook, or to judge me in any way, there is no 
question of their impudence. Impudence is the 
word for it. My world is real. I want to be really 
aristocratic, really brave, really paying for the privi- 
lege of not being a driven worker. The things the 
artist makes are like the things my private dream- 
artist makes, relaxing, distracting. What can Art at 
its greatest be, pure Art that is, but a more splendid, 
more permanent, transmissible reverie! The very 
essence of what I am after is not to be an artist. . . .” 

After a large and serious movement through his 
mind he came back to Science, Philosophy or Politics 
as the sole three justifications for the usurpation of 
leisure. 

So far as devotion to science went, he knew he had 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 165 


no specific aptitude for any departmentalized sub- 
ject, and equally he felt no natural call to philosophy. 
He was left with politics. . . . 

“Or else, why shouldn’t I go down there and pick 
up a shovel and set to work? To make leisure for 
my betters. ...” 

And now it was that he could take up the real 
trouble that more than anything else had been keep- 
ing him ineffective and the prey of every chance 
demand and temptation during the last ten months. 
He had not been able to get himself into politics, 
and the reason why he had not been able to do so 
was that he could not induce himself to fit in. State- 
craft was a remote and faded thing in the political 
life of the time; politics was a choice of two sides 
in a game, and either side he found equally unattrac- 
tive. Since he had come down from Cambridge 
the Tariff Reform people had gone far to capture the 
Conservative party. There was little chance of a 
candidature for him without an adhesion to that. 
And he could find nothing he could imagine himself 
working for in the declarations of the Tariff Reform 
people. He distrusted them, he disliked them. 
They took all the light and pride out of imperialism, 
they reduced it to a shabby conspiracy of the 
British and their colonies against foreign industrial- 
ism. They were violent for armaments and hostile 
to education. They could give him no assurance 
of any scheme of growth and unification, and no 
guarantees against the manifest dangers of economic 
disturbance and political corruption a tariff involves. 


166 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Imperialism without noble imaginations, it seemed 
to him, was simply nationalism with megalomania. 
It was swaggering, it was greed, it was German ; its 
enthusiasm was forced, its nobility a vulgar lie. No. 
And when he turned to the opposite party he found 
little that was more attractive. They were pre- 
pared, it seemed, if they came into office, to pull the 
legislature of the British Isles to pieces in obedience 
to the Irish demand for Home Rule, and they were 
totally unprepared with any scheme for doing this 
that had even a chance of success. In the twenty 
years that had elapsed since Gladstone’s hasty and 
disastrous essay in political surgery they had studied 
nothing, learnt nothing, produced no ideas what- 
ever in the matter. They had not had the time. 
They had just negotiated, like the mere politicians 
they were, for the Nationalist vote. They seemed 
to hope that by a marvel God would pacify Ulster. 
Lord Dunraven, Plunkett, were voices crying in the 
wilderness. The sides in the party game would as 
soon have heeded a poet. . . . But unless Benham 
was prepared to subscribe either to Home Rule or 
Tariff Reform there was no way whatever open to 
him into public life. He had had some decisive 
conversations. He had no illusions left upon that 
score. . . . 

Here was the real barrier that had kept him in- 
active for ten months. Here was the problem he 
had to solve. This was how he had been left out of 
active things, a prey to distractions, excitements, 
idle temptations — and Mrs. Skelmersdale. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 167 


Running away to shoot big game or explore wilder- 
nesses was no remedy. That was just running away. 
Aristocrats do not run away. What of his debt to 
those men down there in the quarry? What of his 
debt to the unseen men in the mines away in the 
north? What of his debt to the stokers on the 
liners, and to the clerks in the city? He reiterated 
the cardinal article of his creed : The aristocrat is a 
privileged man in order that he may be a public and 
political man. 

But how is one to be a political man when one is 
not in politics ? 

Benham frowned at the Weald. His ideas were 
running thin. 

He might hammer at politics from the outside. 
And then again how? He would make a list of all 
the things that he might do. For example he might 
write. He rested one hand on his knee and lifted 
one finger and regarded it. Could he write ? There 
were one or two men who ran papers and seemed to 
have a sort of independent influence. Strachey, for 
example, with his Spectator ; Maxse, with his Na- 
tional Review. But they were grown up, they had 
formed their ideas. He had to learn first. 

He lifted a second finger. How to learn? For it 
was learning that he had to do. 

When one comes down from Oxford or Cambridge 
one falls into the mistake of thinking that learning is 
over and action must begin. But until one .perceives 
clearly just where one stands action is impossible. 

How is one with no experience of affairs to get an 


168 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


experience of affairs when the door of affairs is closed 
to one by one’s own convictions ? Outside of affairs 
how can one escape being flimsy? How can one 
escape becoming merely an intellectual like those 
wordy Fabians, those writers, poseurs, and sham 
publicists whose wrangles he had attended? And, 
moreover, there is danger in the leisure of your 
intellectual. One cannot be always reading and 
thinking and discussing and inquiring. . . . Would 
it not be better after all to make a concession , swallow 
Home Rule or Tariff Reform , and so at least get his 
hands on things ? 

And then in a little while the party conflict would 
swallow him up ? 

Still it would engage him, it would hold him. 
If, perhaps, he did not let it swallow him up. If 
he worked with an eye open for opportunities of 
self-assertion. . . . 

The party game had not altogether swallowed 
“Mr. Arthur. ” . . . 

But every one is not a Balfour. . . . 

He reflected profoundly. On his left knee his left 
hand rested with two fingers held up. By some rapid 
mental alchemy these fingers had now become Home 
Rule and Tariff Reform. His right hand which had 
hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised 
its index finger by imperceptible degrees. It had 
been raised almost subconsciously. And by still 
obscurer processes this finger had become Mrs. 
Skelmersdale. He recognized her sudden reappear- 
ance above the threshold of consciousness with mild 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 169 


surprise. He had almost forgotten her share in 
these problems. He had supposed her dismissed 
to an entirely subordinate position. . . . 

Then he perceived that the workmen in the chalk 
pit far below had knocked off and were engaged 
upon their midday meal. He understood why his 
mind was no longer moving forward with any 
alacrity. 

Food? 

The question where he should eat arose abruptly 
and dismissed all other problems from his mind. 
He unfolded a map. 

Here must be the chalk pit, here was Dorking. 
That village was Brockham Green. Should he go 
down to Dorking or this way over Box Hill to the 
little inn at Burford Bridge. He would try the 
latter. 

§ 14 

The April sunset found our young man talking to 
himself for greater emphasis, and wandering along 
a turfy cart-track through a wilderness mysteriously 
planted with great bushes of rhododendra on the 
Downs above Shere. He had eaten a belated lunch 
at Burford Bridge, he had got some tea at a little 
inn near a church with a splendid yew tree, and for 
the rest of the time he had wandered and thought. 
He had travelled perhaps a dozen or fifteen miles, 
and a good way from his first meditations above the 
Dorking chalk pit. 

He had recovered long ago from that remarkable 


170 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


conception of an active if dishonest political career as 
a means of escaping Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that 
Mrs. Skelmersdale symbolized. That would be just 
louting from one bad thing to another. He had 
to settle Mrs. Skelmersdale clean and right, and he 
had to do as exquisitely right in politics as he could 
devise. If the public life of the country had got 
itself into a stupid antagonism of two undesirable 
things, the only course for a sane man of honour was 
to stand out from the parties and try and get them 
back to sound issues again. There must be endless 
people of a mind with himself in this matter. And 
even if there were not, if he was the only man in the 
world, he still had to follow his lights and do the 
right. And his business was to find out the 
right. . . . 

He came back from these imaginative excursions 
into contemporary politics with one idea confirmed in 
his mind, an idea that had been indeed already in his 
mind during his Cambridge days. This was the idea 
of working out for himself, thoroughly and com- 
pletely, a political scheme, a theory of his work and 
duty in the world, a plan of the world’s future that 
should give a rule for his life. The Research Mag- 
nificent was emerging. It was an alarm! ngly vast 
proposal, but he could see no alternative but sub- 
mission, a plebeian’s submission to the currents of 
life about him. 

Little pictures began to flit before his imagination 
of the way in which he might build up this tremen- 
dous inquiry. He would begin by hunting up people, 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 171 

everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise 
ideas he would get at. He would travel far — and 
exhaustively. He would, so soon as the ideas seemed 
to indicate it, hunt out facts. He would learn how 
the world was governed. He would learn how it did 
its thinking. He would live sparingly. (“Not too 
sparingly,” something interpolated.) He would 
work ten or twelve hours a day. Such a course of 
investigation must pass almost of its own accord 
into action and realization. He need not trouble 
now how it would bring him into politics. Inevi- 
tably somewhere it would bring him into politics. 
And he would travel. Almost at once he would 
travel. It is the manifest duty of every young 
aristocrat to travel. Here he was, ruling India. 
At any rate, passively, through the mere fact of 
being English, he was ruling India. And he knew 
nothing of India. He knew nothing indeed of Asia. 
So soon as he returned to London his preparations 
for this travel must begin, he must plot out the men 
to whom he would go, and so contrive that also he 
would go round the world. Perhaps he would get 
Lionel Maxim to go with him. Or if Maxim could 
not come, then possibly Prothero. Some one surely 
could be found, some one thinking and talking of 
statecraft and the larger idea of life. All the world 
is not swallowed up in every day. . . . 

§ 15 

His mind shifted very suddenly from these large 
proposals to an entirely different theme. These 


172 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


mental landslips are not unusual when men are think- 
ing hard and wandering. He found himself holding 
a trial upon himself for Presumptuousness, for setting 
himself up against the wisdom of the ages, and the 
decisions of all the established men in the world, for 
being in short a Presumptuous Sort of Ass. He was 
judge and jury and prosecutor, but rather inexpli- 
cably the defence was conducted in an irregular and 
undignified way by some inferior stratum of his 
being. 

At first the defence contented itself with arguments 
that did at least aim to rebut the indictment. The 
decisions of all the established men in the world were 
notoriously in conflict. However great was the 
gross wisdom of the ages the net wisdom was re- 
markably small. Was it after all so very immodest 
to believe that the Liberals were right in what they 
said about Tariff Reform, and the Tories right in their 
criticism of Home Rule? 

And then suddenly the defence threw aside its 
mask and insisted that Benham had to take this 
presumptuous line because there was no other 
tolerable line possible for him. 

“ Better die with the Excelsior chap up the moun- 
tains/ ? the defence interjected. 

Than what ? 

Consider the quality Benham had already be- 
trayed. He was manifestly incapable of a decent 
modest mediocre existence. Already he had ceased 
to be — if one may use so fine a word for genteel 
abstinence — virtuous. He didn’t ride well, he 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 173 


hadn’t good hands, and he hadn’t good hands for 
life. He must go hard and harsh, high or low. He 
was a man who needed bite in his life. He was ex- 
ceptionally capable of boredom. He had been bored 
by London. Social occasions irritated him, several 
times he had come near to gross incivilities, art an- 
noyed him, sport was an effort, wholesome perhaps, 
but unattractive, music he loved, but it excited him. 
The defendant broke the sunset calm by uttering 
amazing and improper phrases. 

“ I can’t smug about in a state of falsified righteous- 
ness like these Crampton chaps. 

“I shall roll in women. I shall rollick in women. 
If, that is, I stay in London with nothing more to do 
than I have had this year past. 

“ I’ve been sliding fast to it. . . . 

“No! Pm damned if I do! . . .” 

§ 16 

For some time he had been bothered by a sense 
of something, something else, awaiting his attention. 
Now it came swimming up into his consciousness. 
He had forgotten. He was, of course, going to sleep 
out under the stars. 

He had settled that overnight, that was why he had 
this cloak in his rucksack, but he had settled none of 
the details. Now he must find some place where he 
could lie down. Here, perhaps, in this strange for- 
gotten wilderness of rhododendra. 

He turned off from the track and wandered among 
the bushes. One might lie down anywhere here. 


174 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


But not yet; it was as yet barely twilight. He 
consulted his watch. Half-past seven. 

Nearly dinner-time. . . . 

No doubt Christian during the earlier stages of his 
pilgrimage noticed the recurrence of the old familiar 
hours of his life of emptiness and vanity. Or rather 
of vanity — simply. Why drag in the thought of 
emptiness just at this point? . . . 

It was very early to go to bed. 

He might perhaps sit and think for a time. Here 
for example was a mossy bank, a seat, and presently a 
bed. So far there were only three stars visible but 
more would come. He dropped into a reclining 
attitude. Damp ! 

When one thinks of sleeping out under the stars 
one is apt to forget the dew. 

He spread his Swiss cloak out on the soft thick 
carpeting of herbs and moss, and arranged his knap- 
sack as a pillow. Here he would lie and recapitulate 
the thoughts of the day. (That squealing might be 
a young fox.) At the club at present men would be 
sitting about holding themselves back from dinner. 
Excellent the clear soup always was at the club ! 
Then perhaps a Chateaubriand. That — what was 
that? Soft and large and quite near and noiseless. 
An owl ! 

The damp feeling was coming through his cloak. 
And this April night air had a knife edge. Early 
ice coming down the Atlantic perhaps. It was 
wonderful to be here on the top of the round world 
and feel the icebergs away there. Or did this wind 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 175 


come from Russia? He wasn’t quite clear just how 
he was oriented, he had turned about so much. 
Which was east ? Anyhow it was an extremely cold 
wind. 

What had he been thinking? Suppose after all 
that ending with Mrs. Skelmersdale was simply a 
beginning. So far he had never looked sex in the 
face. . . . 

He sat up and sneezed violently. 

It would be ridiculous to start out seeking the clue 
to one’s life and be driven home by rheumatic fever. 
One should not therefore incur the risk of rheumatic 
fever. 

Something squealed in the bushes. 

It was impossible to collect one’s thoughts in this 
place. He stood up. The night was going to be 
bitterly cold, savagely, cruelly cold. . . . 

No. There was no thinking to be done here, no 
thinking at all. He would go on along the track 
and presently he would strike a road and so come to 
an inn. One can solve no problems when one is 
engaged in a struggle with the elements. The thing 
to do now was to find that track again. . . . 

It took Benham two hours of stumbling and 
walking, with a little fence climbing and some barbed 
wire thrown in, before he got down into Shere to the 
shelter of a friendly little inn. And then he nego- 
tiated a satisfying meal, with beef-steak as its cen- 
tral fact, and stipulated for a fire in his bedroom. 

The landlord was a pleasant-faced man; he at- 
tended to Benham himself and displayed a fine sense 


176 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


of comfort. He could produce wine, a half-bottle 
of Australian hock, Big Tree brand No. 8, a virile 
wine, he thought of sardines to precede the meal, he 
provided a substantial Welsh rarebit by way of a 
savoury, he did not mind in the least that it was 
nearly ten o’clock. He ended by suggesting coffee. 
“And a liqueur?” 

Benham had some Benedictine! 

One could not slight such sympathetic helpfulness. 
The Benedictine was genuine. And then came the 
coffee. 

The cup of coffee was generously conceived and 
honestly made. 

A night of clear melancholy ensued. . . . 

§ 17 

Hitherto Benham had not faced in any detail the 
problem of how to break with Mrs. Skelmersdale. 
Now he faced it pessimistically. She would, he 
knew, be difficult to break with. (He ought never 
to have gone there to lunch.) There would be some- 
thing ridiculous in breaking off. In all sorts of ways 
she might resist. And face to face with her he might 
find himself a man divided against himself. That 
opened preposterous possibilities. On the other hand 
it was out of the question to do the business by 
letter. A letter hits too hard ; it lies too heavy on 
the wound it has made. And in money matters 
he could be generous. He must be generous. At 
least financial worries need not complicate her dis- 
tresses of desertion. But to suggest such gener- 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 177 


osities on paper, in cold ink, would be outrageous. 
And, in brief — he ought not to have gone there 
to lunch. After that he began composing letters 
at a great rate. Delicate — explanatory. Was it 
on the whole best to be explanatory? . . . 

It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking 
with her. And it had begun so easily. . . . 

There was, he remembered with amazing vivid- 
ness, a little hollow he had found under her ear, and 
how when he kissed her there it always made her 
forget her worries and ethical problems for a time 
and turn to him. . . . 

“No,” he said grimly, “it must end,” and rolled 
over and stared at the black. . . . 

Like an insidious pedlar, that old rascal whom 
young literary gentlemen call the Great God Pan, 
began to spread his wares in the young man’s 
memory. . . . 

After long and feverish wanderings of the mind, 
and some talking to himself and walking about the 
room, he did at last get a little away from Mrs. 
Skelmersdale. 

He perceived that when he came to tell his mother 
about this journey around the world there would be 
great difficulties. She would object very strongly, 
and if that did not do then she would become ex- 
tremely abusive, compare him to his father, cry 
bitterly, and banish him suddenly and heartbrokenly 
from her presence for ever. She had done that 
twice already — once about going to the opera 
instead of listening to a lecture on Indian ethnology 


N 


178 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


and once about a week-end in Kent. ... He hated 
hurting his mother, and he was beginning to know 
now how easily she was hurt. It is an abominable 
thing to hurt one’s mother — whether one has a 
justification or whether one hasn’t. 

Recoiling from this, he was at once resumed by 
Mrs. Skelmersdale. Who had in fact an effect of 
really never having been out of the room. But now 
he became penitent about her. His penitence 
expanded until it was on a nightmare scale. At 
last it blotted out the heavens. He felt like one of 
those unfortunate victims of religious mania who are 
convinced they have committed the Sin against the 
Holy Ghost. (Why had he gone there to lunch? 
That was the key to it. Why had he gone there to 
lunch?) ... He began to have remorse for every- 
thing, for everything he had ever done, for every- 
thing he had ever not done, for everything in the 
world. In a moment of lucidity he even had 
remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of black 
coffee. . . . 

And so on and so on and so on. . . . 

When daylight came it found Benham still wide 
awake. Things crept mournfully out of the darkness 
into a reproachful clearness. The sound of birds 
that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now 
no longer agreeable. The thrushes, he thought, re- 
peated themselves a great deal. 

He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes 
before the landlord, accompanied by a great smell of 
frying bacon, came to call him. 


THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN 179 


§18 

The second day opened rather dully for Benham. 
There was not an idea left in his head about any- 
thing in the world. It was — solid. He walked 
through Bramley and Godaiming and Witley and 
so came out upon the purple waste of Hindhead. 
He strayed away from the road and found a sunny 
place of turf amidst the heather and lay down and 
slept for an hour or so. He arose refreshed. He 
got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead 
crest and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses 
variegated by patches of spruce and fir and silver 
birch. And then suddenly his mental inanition was 
at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave 
again. He was astonished that for a moment he 
could have forgotten that he was vowed to the 
splendid life. 

“ Continence by preoccupation ; ” he tried the 
phrase. . . . 

“A man must not give in to fear; neither must 
he give in to sex. It’s the same thing really. The 
misleading of instinct.” 

This set the key of his thought throughout the 
afternoon — until Amanda happened to him. 


CHAPTER THE THIRD 
Amanda 


§1 

Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly. 

From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths 
and gorse beyond Liphook, and thence he had wan- 
dered into a pretty district beset with Hartings. He 
had found himself upon a sandy ridge looking very 
beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt 
was Harting Coombe ; he had been through a West 
Harting and a South Harting and read finger-posts 
pointing to others of the clan ; and in the evening, at 
the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat 
down to consider whether he should go back and 
spend the night in one of the two kindly-looking inns 
of the latter place or push on over the South Downs 
towards the unknown luck of Singleton or Chichester. 
As he sat down two big retrievers, black and brown, 
came headlong down the road. The black carried 
a stick, the brown disputed and pursued. As they 
came abreast of him the foremost a little relaxed 
his hold, the pursuer grabbed at it, and in an instant 
the rivalry had flared to rage and a first-class dog- 
fight was in progress. 

Benham detested dog-fights. He stood up, pale 
180 


AMANDA 


181 


and distressed. “ Lie down !” he cried. “ Shut up, 
you brutes !” and was at a loss for further action. 

Then it was Amanda leapt into his world, a light, 
tall figure of a girl, fluttering a short petticoat. 
Hatless she was, brown, flushed, and her dark hair 
tossing loose, and in a moment she had the snarling 
furious dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar. 
Then with a wriggle black was loose and had closed 
again. Inspired by the best traditions of chivalry 
Benham came to her assistance. He was not expert 
with dogs. He grasped the black dog under its ear. 
He was bitten in the wrist, rather in excitement 
than malice, and with a certain excess of zeal he was 
strangling the brute before you could count ten. 

Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the 
dog she held, reasonably but effectively until its yelps 
satisfied her. “ There ! ” she said pitching her victim 
from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the 
proceedings of her helper for the first time. 

“You needn’t,” she said, “choke Sultan anymore.” 

“Ugh!” she said, as though that was enough for 
Sultan. And peace was restored. 

“I’m obliged to you. But — ... I say! He 
didn’t bite you, did he? Oh, Sultan /” 

Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair. 
Rotten business. When a fellow is fighting one can’t 
be meticulous. And if people come interfering. 
Still — sorry ! So Sultan by his code of eye and 
tail. 

“May I see? . . . Something ought to be done 
to this. ...” 


182 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and 
eyelashes came within a foot of his face. 

Some observant element in his composition 
guessed, and guessed quite accurately, that she was 
nineteen. . . . 


§2 

She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a 
camel’s-hair brush, she had a glowing face, half 
childish imp, half woman, she had honest hazel 
eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of char- 
acter. And he must have this bite seen to at once. 
She lived not five minutes away. He must come 
with her. 

She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and 
a mother who behaved like a genteel visitor, and they 
both agreed with Amanda that although Mr. Walter 
Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did 
seem to have stamped out rabies, yet you couldn’t be 
too careful with a dog bite. A dog bite might be 
injurious in all sorts of ways — particularly Sultan’s 
bite. He was, they had to confess, a dog without 
refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog. Both 
the elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham’s 
wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of 
Amanda from imminent danger — “ she’s always so 
reckless with those dogs,” as though Amanda was not 
manifestly capable of taking care of herself ; and 
when he had been Listerined and bandaged, they 
would have it that he should join them at their 
supper-dinner, which was already prepared and 


AMANDA 


183 


waiting. They treated him as if he were still an 
undergraduate, they took his arrangements in hand 
as though he was a favourite nephew. He must 
stay in Harting that night. Both the Ship and the 
Coach and Horses were excellent inns, and over the 
Downs there would be nothing for miles and miles. . . . 

The house was a little long house with a verandah 
and a garden in front of it with flint-edged paths ; 
the room in which they sat and ate was long and low 
and equipped with pieces of misfitting good furniture, 
an accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a 
sprinkling of old and middle-aged books. Some one 
had lit a fire, which cracked and spurted about 
cheerfully in a motherly fireplace, and a lamp and 
some candles got lit. Mrs. Wilder, Amanda’s aunt, 
a comfortable dark broad-browed woman, directed 
things, and sat at the end of the table and placed 
Benham on her right hand between herself and 
Amanda. Amanda’s mother remained undeveloped, 
a watchful little woman with at least an eyebrow 
like her daughter’s. Her name, it seemed, was 
Morris. No servant appeared, but two cousins of 
a vague dark picturesqueness and with a stamp of 
thirty upon them, the first young women Benham 
had ever seen dressed in djibbahs, sat at the table 
or moved about and attended to the simple needs 
of the service. The reconciled dogs were in the 
room and shifted inquiring noses from one human 
being to another. 

Amanda’s people were so easy and intelligent and 
friendly, and Benham after his thirty hours of silence 


184 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


so freshly ready for human association, that in 
a very little while he could have imagined he had 
known and trusted this household for years. He 
had never met such people before, and yet there was 
something about them that seemed familiar — and 
then it occurred to him that something of their 
easy-going freedom was to be found in Russian 
novels. A photographic enlargement of somebody 
with a vegetarian expression of face and a special 
kind of slouch hat gave the atmosphere a flavour of 
Socialism, and a press and tools and stamps and 
pigments on an oak table in the corner suggested 
some such socialistic art as bookbinding. They 
were clearly ‘ advanced’ people. And Amanda was 
tremendously important to them, she was their 
light, their pride, their most living thing. They 
focussed on her. When he talked to them all in 
general he talked to her in particular. He felt that 
some introduction of himself was due to these wel- 
coming people. He tried to give it mixed with an 
itinerary and a sketch of his experiences. He 
praised the heather country and Harting Coombe 
and the Hartings. He told them that London had 
suddenly become intolerable — “In the spring sun- 
shine.’ ^ ’ 

“You live in London?” said Mrs. Wilder. 

Yes. And he had wanted to think things out. 
In London one could do no thinking — 

“Here we do nothing else,” said Amanda. 

“Except dog-fights,” said the elder cousin. 

“I thought I would just wander and think and 


AMANDA 


185 


sleep in the open air. Have you ever tried to sleep 
in the open air?” 

“In the summer we all do,” said the younger 
cousin. “Amanda makes us. We go out on to the 
little lawn at the back.” 

“You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield. 
And there they all go out and camp and sleep in the 
woods.” 

“Of course,” reflected Mrs. Wilder, “in April it 
must be different.” 

“It is different,” said Benham with feeling; “the 
night comes five hours too soon. And it comes wet.” 
He described his experiences and his flight to Shere 
and the kindly landlord and the cup of coffee. “And 
after that I thought with a vengeance.” 

“Do you write things?” asked Amanda abruptly, 
and it seemed to him with a note of hope. 

“No. No, it was just a private puzzle. It was 
something I couldn’t get straight.” 

“And you have got it straight?” asked Amanda. 

“I think so.” 

“You were making up your mind about some- 
thing?” 

“Amanda dear!” cried her mother. 

“Oh ! I don’t mind telling you,” said Benham. 

They seemed such unusual people that he was 
moved to unusual confidences. They had that effect 
one gets at times with strangers freshly met as 
though they were not really in the world. And 
there was something about Amanda that made him 
want to explain himself to her completely. 


186 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ What I wanted to think about was what I should 
do with my life.” 

“ Haven’t you any work — ?” asked the elder 
cousin. 

“None that I’m obliged to do.” 

“That’s where a man has the advantage,” said 
Amanda with the tone of profound reflection. 
“You can choose. And what are you going to do 
with your life?” 

“Amanda,” her mother protested, “really you 
mustn’t!” 

“I’m going round the world to think about it,” 
Benham told her. 

“I’d give my soul to travel,” said Amanda. 

She addressed her remark to the salad in front of 
her. 

“But have you no ties?” asked Mrs. Wilder. 

“None that hold me,” said Benham. “I’m one of 
those unfortunates who needn’t do anything at all. 
I’m independent. You see my riddles. East and 
west and north and south, it’s all my way for the 
taking. There’s not an indication.” 

“If I were you,” said Amanda, and reflected. 
Then she half turned herself to him. “I should go 
first to India,” she said, “and I should shoot, one, two, 
three, yes, three tigers. And then I would see 
Farukhabad Sikri — I was reading in a book about 
it yesterday — where the jungle grows in the pal- 
aces; and then I would go right up the Himalayas,* 
and then, then I would have a walking tour in 
Japan, and then I would sail in a sailing ship down 


AMANDA 


187 


to Borneo and Java and set myself up as a Ranee — 
... And then I would think what I would do 
next.” 

“All alone, Amanda?” asked Mrs. Wilder. 

“Only when I shoot tigers. You and mother 
should certainly come to Japan.” 

“But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn’t intend to 
shoot tigers, Amanda?” said Amanda’s mother. 

“Not at once. My way will be a little different. 
I think I shall go first through Germany. And then 
down to Constantinople. And then I’ve some idea 
of getting across Asia Minor and Persia to India. 
That would take some time. One must ride.” 

“Asia Minor ought to be fun,” said Amanda. 
“But I should prefer India because of the tigers. It 
would be so jolly to begin with the tigers right away.” 

“It is the towns and governments and peoples I 
want to see rather than tigers,” said Benham. 
“Tigers if they are in the programme. But I want 
to find out about — other things.” 

“Don’t you think there’s something to be found 
out at home?” said the elder cousin, blushing very 
brightly and speaking with the effort of one who 
speaks for conscience’ sake. 

“Betty’s a Socialist,” Amanda said to Benham with 
a suspicion of apology. 

“Well, we’re all rather that,” Mrs. Wilder pro- 
tested. 

“If you are free, if you are independent, then don’t 
you owe something to the workers?” Betty went on, 
getting graver and redder with each word. 


188 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“It's just because of that,” said Benham, “that 
I am going round the world.” 

§3 

He was as free with these odd people as if he had 
been talking to Prothero. They were — alert. And 
he had been alone and silent and full of thinking for 
two clear days. He tried to explain why he found 
Socialism at once obvious and inadequate. . . . 

Presently the supper things got themselves put 
away and the talk moved into a smaller room with 
several armchairs and a fire. Mrs. Wilder and the 
cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it 
were symbolical, and they were joined by a grave 
grey-bearded man with a hyphenated name and 
slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a very blue 
linen shirt and collar, a very woolly mustard-col- 
oured suit and loose tie, and manifestly devoted to 
one of those branches of exemplary domestic deco- 
ration that grow upon Socialist soil in England. 
He joined Betty in the opinion that the duty of a 
free and wealthy young man was to remain in 
England and give himself to democratic Socialism 
and the abolition of “profiteering.” “Consider 
that chair,” he said. But Benham had little feeling 
for the craftsmanship of chairs. 

Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders 
became entangled and prophetic. It was evident 
he had never thought out his “democratic,” he had 
rested in some vague tangle of idealism from which 
Benham now set himself with the zeal of a specialist 


AMANDA 


189 


to rout him. Such an argument sprang up as one 
meets with rarely beyond the happy undergraduate’s 
range. Everybody lived in the discussion, even 
Amanda’s mother listened visibly. Betty said she 
herself was certainly democratic and Mrs. Wilder 
had always thought herself to be so, and outside the 
circle round the fire Amanda hovered impatiently, 
not quite sure of her side as yet, but eager to come 
down with emphasis at the first flash of intimation. 

She came down vehemently on Benham’s. , 

And being a very clear-cutting personality with 
an instinct for the material rendering of things, she 
also came and sat beside him on the little square- 
cornered sofa. 

“Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,” she said, “of 
course the world must belong to the people who dare. 
Of course people aren’t all alike, and dull people, 
as Mr. Benham says, and spiteful people, and nar- 
row people have no right to any voice at all in 
things. ...” 


§4 

In saying this she did but echo Benham’s very 
words, and all she said and did that evening was in 
quick response to Benham’s earnest expression of his 
views. She found Benham a delightful novelty. 
She liked to argue because there was no other talk 
so lively, and she had perhaps a lurking intellectual 
grudge against Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that made 
her welcome an ally. Everything from her that 
night that even verges upon the notable has been 


190 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


told, and yet it sufficed, together with something in 
the clear, long line of her limbs, in her voice, in her 
general physical quality, to convince Benham that 
she was the freest, finest, bravest spirit that he had 
ever encountered. 

In the papers he left behind him was to be found 
his perplexed endeavours to explain this mental leap, 
that after all his efforts still remained unexplained. 
He had been vividly impressed by the decision and 
courage of her treatment of the dogs ; it was just the 
sort of thing he could not do. And there was a 
certain contagiousness in the petting admiration 
with which her family treated her. But she was 
young and healthy and so was he, and in a second 
mystery lies the key of the first. He had fallen in 
love with her, and that being so whatever he needed 
that instantly she was. He needed a companion, 
clean and brave and understanding. . . . 

In his bed in the Ship that night he thought of 
nothing but her before he went to sleep, and when 
next morning he walked on his way over the South 
Downs to Chichester his mind was full of her 
image and of a hundred pleasant things about her. 
In his confessions he wrote, “I felt there was a 
sword in her spirit. I felt she was as clean as the 
wind.” 

Love is the most chastening of powers, and he did 
not even remember now that two days before he had 
told the wind and the twilight that he would cer- 
tainly “roll and rollick in women” unless there was 
work for him to do. She had a peculiarly swift and 


AMANDA 


191 


easy stride that went with him in his thoughts along 
the turf by the wayside halfway and more to Chich- 
ester. He thought always of the two of them as 
being side by side. His imagination became child- 
ishly romantic. The open down about him with its 
scrub of thorn and yew became the wilderness of the 
world, and through it they went — in armour, 
weightless armour — and they wore long swords. 
There was a breeze blowing and larks were singing 
and something, something dark and tortuous dashed 
suddenly in headlong flight from before their feet. 
It was an ethical problem such as those Mrs. Skel- 
mersdale nursed in her bosom. But at the sight of 
Amanda it had straightened out — and fled. . . . 

And interweaving with such imaginings, he was 
some day to record, there were others. She had 
brought back to his memory the fancies that had 
been aroused in his first reading of Plato’s Republic ; 
she made him think of those women Guardians, who 
were the friends and mates of men. He wanted 
now to re-read that book and the Laws. He could 
not remember if the Guardians were done in the Laws 
as well as in the Republic. He wished he had both 
these books in his rucksack, but as he had not, he 
decided he would hunt for them in Chichester. 
When would he see Amanda again? He would ask 
his mother to make the acquaintance of these very 
interesting people, but as they did not come to 
London very much it might be some time before he 
had a chance of seeing her again. And, besides, he 
was going to America and India. The prospect of an 


192 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


exploration of the world was still noble and attrac- 
tive; but he realized it would stand very much in 
the way of his seeing more of Amanda. Would it be 
a startling and unforgivable thing if presently he 
began to write to her? Girls of that age and spirit 
living in out-of-the-way villages have been known 
to marry. . . . 

Marriage didn’t at this stage strike Benham as an 
agreeable aspect of Amanda’s possibilities ; it was an 
inconvenience ; his mind was running in the direction 
of pedestrian tours in armour of no particular weight, 
amidst scenery of a romantic wildness. . . . 

When he had gone to the house and taken his 
leave that morning it had seemed quite in the vein 
of the establishment that he should be received by 
Amanda alone and taken up the long garden before 
anybody else appeared, to see the daffodils and the 
early apple-trees in blossom and the pear-trees white 
and delicious. 

Then he had taken his leave of them all and made 
his social tentatives. Did they ever come to Lon- 
don? When they did they must let his people 
know. He would so like them to know his mother, 
Lady Marayne. And so on with much gratitude. 

Amanda had said that she and the dogs would 
come with him up the hill, she had said it exactly 
as a boy might have said it, she had brought him up 
to the corner of Up Park and had sat down there on 
a heap of stones and watched him until he was out 
of sight, waving to him when he looked back. 
“Come back again,” she had cried. 


AMANDA 


193 


In Chichester he found a little green-bound Re- 
public in a second-hand book-shop near the Cathe- 
dral, but there was no copy of the Laws to be found 
in the place. Then he was taken with the brilliant 
idea of sleeping the night in Chichester and going 
back next day via Harting to Petersfield station and 
London. He carried out this scheme and got to 
South Harting neatly about four o’clock in the after- 
noon. He found Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and 
Amanda and the dogs entertaining Mr. Rathbone- 
Sanders at tea, and they all seemed a little surprised, 
and, except Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, they all seemed 
pleased to see him again so soon. His explanation 
of why he hadn’t gone back to London from Chich- 
ester struck him as a little unconvincing in the 
cold light of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders’ eye. But 
Amanda was manifestly excited by his return, and 
he told them his impressions of Chichester and 
described the entertainment of the evening guest 
at a country inn and suddenly produced his copy of 
the Republic. “I found this in a book-shop,” he 
said, “and I brought it for you, because it describes 
one of the best dreams of aristocracy there has ever 
been dreamt.” 

At first she praised it as a pretty book in the dear- 
est little binding, and then realized that there were 
deeper implications, and became grave and said she 
would read it through and through, she loved such 
speculative reading. 

She came to the door with the others and stayed 
at the door after they had gone in again. When he 


194 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


looked back at the corner of the road to Petersfield 
she was still at the door and waved farewell to him. 

He only saw a light slender figure, but when she 
came back into the sitting-room Mr. Rathbone- 
Sanders noted the faint flush in her cheek and an 
unwonted abstraction in her eye. 

And in the evening she tucked her feet up in the 
armchair by the lamp and read the Republic very 
intently and very thoughtfully, occasionally turning 
over a page. 


§5 

When Benham got back to London he experi- 
enced an unwonted desire to perform his social 
obligations to the utmost. 

So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he 
wrote his South Harting friends a most agreeable 
letter of thanks for their kindness to him. In a 
little while he hoped he should see them again. His 
mother, too, was most desirous to meet them. . . . 
That done, he went on to his flat and to various 
aspects of life for which he was quite unprepared. 

But here we may note that Amanda answered 
him. Her reply came some four days later. It was 
written in a square schoolgirl hand, it covered three 
sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent 
essay upon the Republic of Plato. “Of course,” she 
wrote, “the Guardians are inhuman, but it was a 
glorious sort of inhumanity. They had a spirit 
— like sharp knives cutting through life.” 

It was her best bit of phrasing and it pleased 


AMANDA 


195 


Benham very much. But, indeed, it was not her 
own phrasing, she had culled it from a disquisition 
into which she had led Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, and 
she had sent it to Benham as she might have sent 
him a flower. 


§6 

Benham re-entered the flat from which he had fled 
so precipitately with three very definite plans in his 
mind. The first was to set out upon his grand tour 
of the world with as little delay as possible, to shut 
up this Finacue Street establishment for a long time, 
and get rid of the soul-destroying perfections of 
Merkle. The second was to end his ill-advised 
intimacy with little Mrs. Skelmersdale as generously 
and cheerfully as possible. The third was to bring 
Lady Marayne into social relations with the Wilder 
and Morris menage at South Harting. It did not 
strike him that there was any incompatibility among 
these projects or any insurmountable difficulty in 
any of them until he was back in his flat. 

The accumulation of letters, packages and telephone 
memoranda upon his desk included a number of 
notes and slips to remind him that both Mrs. Skel- 
mersdale and his mother were ladies of some deter- 
mination. Even as he stood turning over the pile 
of documents the mechanical vehemence of the tele- 
phone filled him with a restored sense of the adverse 
will in things. “Yes, mam/' he heard Merkle’s 
voice, “yes, mam. I will tell him, mam. Will 
you keep possession, mam.” And then in the door- 


196 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


way of the study, “Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. Upon 
the telephone, sir.” 

Benham reflected with various notes in his hand. 
Then he went to the telephone. 

“You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?” 

“I’ve been away. I may have to go away again.” 

“Not before you have seen me. Come round 
and tell me all about it.” 

Benham lied about an engagement. 

“Then to-morrow in the morning.” . . . Im- 
possible. 

“ In the afternoon. You don’t want to see me.” 
Benham did want to see her. 

“Come round and have a jolly little evening 
to-morrow night. I’ve got some more of that 
harpsichord music. And I’m dying to see you. 
Don’t you understand?” 

Further lies. “Look here,” said Benham, “can 
you come and have a talk in Kensington Gardens? 
You know the place, near that Chinese garden. 
Paddington Gate. ...” 

The lady’s voice fell to flatness. She agreed. 
“But why not come to see me here?” she asked. 

Benham hung up the receiver abruptly. 

He walked slowly back to his study. “Phew!” 
he whispered to himself. It was like hitting her in 
the face. He didn’t want to be a brute, but short of 
being a brute there was no way out for him from this 
entanglement. Why, oh! why the devil had he 
gone there to lunch? . . . 

He resumed his examination of the waiting letters 


AMANDA 


197 


with a ruffled mind. The most urgent thing about 
them was the clear evidence of gathering anger on 
the part of his mother. He had missed a lunch 
party at Sir Godfrey's on Tuesday and a dinner 
engagement at Philip Magnet's, quite an important 
dinner in its way, with various promising young 
Liberals, on Wednesday evening. And she was 
furious at “this stupid mystery. Of course you're 
bound to be found out, and of course there will be a 
scandal." ... He perceived that this last note 
was written on his own paper. “Merkle !" he cried 
sharply. 

“Yessir!" 

Merkle had been just outside, on call. 

“Did my mother write any of these notes here?" 
he asked. 

“Two, sir. Her ladyship was round here three 
times, sir." 

“Did she see all these letters?" 

“Not the telephone calls, sir. I 'ad put them on 
one side. But . . . It's a little thing, sir." 

He paused and came a step nearer. “You see, 
sir," he explained with the faintest flavour of the 
confidential softening his mechanical respect, “yes- 
terday, when 'er ladyship was 'ere, sir, some one rang 
up on the telephone — " 

“But you, Merkle — " 

“Exactly, sir. But 'er ladyship said Til go to 
that, Merkle,' and just for a moment I couldn't 
exactly think 'ow I could manage it, sir, and there 
'er ladyship was, at the telephone. What passed, 


198 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


sir, I couldn’t ’ear. I ’eard her say, ‘Any message?’ 
And 1 fancy, sir, I ’eard ’er say, ‘I’m the ’ousemaid,’ 
but that, sir, I think must have been a mistake, 
sir.” 

“Must have been,” said Benham. “Certainly — 
must have been. And the call you think came 
from — ?” 

“There again, sir, I’m quite in the dark. But of 
course, sir, it’s usually Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. 
Just about her time in the afternoon. On an aver- 
age, sir. ...” 


§7 

“I went out of London to think about my life.” 

It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not be- 
lieve him. 

“Alone?” she asked. 

“Of course alone.” 

“Stuff!” said Lady Marayne. 

She had taken him into her own little sitting-room, 
she had thrown aside gloves and fan and theatre 
wrap, curled herself comfortably into the abun- 
dantly cushioned corner by the fire, and proceeded 
to a mixture of cross-examination and tirade that he 
found it difficult to make head against. She was 
vibrating between distressed solicitude and resent- 
ful anger. She was infuriated at his going away and 
deeply concerned at what could have taken him 
away. “I was worried,” he said. “London is too 
crowded to think in. I wanted to get myself alone.” 

“And there I was while you were getting yourself 


AMANDA 


199 


alone, as you call it, wearing my poor little brains out 
to think of some story to tell people. I had to stuff 
them up you had a sprained knee at Chexington, 
and for all I knew any of them might have been 
seeing you that morning. Besides what has a boy 
like you to worry about? It’s all nonsense, Poff.” 

She awaited his explanations. Benham looked 
for a moment like his father. 

“I'm not getting on, mother,” he said. “I’m 
scattering myself. Fm getting no grip. I want to 
get a better hold upon life, or else I do not see what 
is to keep me from going to pieces — and wasting 
existence. It’s rather difficult sometimes to tell 
what one thinks and feels — ” 

She had not really listened to him. 

“Who is that woman,” she interrupted suddenly, 
“Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or some such name, who rings 
you up on the telephone?” 

Benham hesitated, blushed, and regretted it. 

“Mrs. Skelmersdale,” he said after a little pause. 

“It’s all the same. Who is she?” 

“She’s a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and 
I went with her to one of those Dolmetsch concerts.” 

He stopped. 

Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a 
little while. “All men,” she said at last, “are alike. 
Husbands, sons and brothers, they are all alike. 
Sons ! One expects them to be different. The}' 
aren’t different. Why should they be? I suppose 
I ought to be shocked, Poff. But I’m not- She 
seems to be very fond of you.” 


200 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ She’s — she’s very good — in her way. She’s 
had a difficult life. ...” 

“You can’t leave a man about for a moment,” 
Lady Marayne reflected. “Poff, I wish you’d fetch 
me a glass of water.” 

When he returned she was looking very fixedly 
into the fire. “Put it down,” she said, “anywhere. 
Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a discreet sort of 
woman? Do you like her ? ” She asked a few addi- 
tional particulars and Benham made his grudging 
admission of facts. “What I still don’t understand, 
Poff, is why you have been away.” 

“I went away,” said Benham, “because I want to 
clear things up.” 

“But why? Is there some one else?” 

“No.” 

“You went alone? All the time?” 

“I’ve told you I went alone. Do you think I tell 
you lies, mother?” 

“Everybody tells lies somehow,” said Lady Ma- 
rayne. “Easy lies or stiff ones. Don’t flourish , 
Poff. Don’t start saying things like a moral wind- 
mill in a whirlwind. It’s all a muddle. I suppose 
every one in London is getting in or out of these 
entanglements — or something of the sort. And 
this seems a comparatively slight one. I wish it 
hadn’t happened. They do happen.” 

An expression of perplexity came into her face. 
She looked at him. “Why do you want to throw 
her over?” 

“I want to throw her over,” said Benham. 


AMANDA 


201 


He stood up and went to the hearthrug, and his 
mother reflected that this was exactly what all men 
did at just this phase of a discussion. Then things 
ceased to be sensible. 

From overhead he said to her: “I want to get 
away from this complication, this servitude. I want 
to do some — some work. I want to get my mind 
clear and my hands clear. I want to study govern- 
ment and the big business of the world.” 

“And she’s in the way?” 

He assented. 

“You men!” said Lady Marayne after a little 
pause. “What queer beasts you are! Here is a 
woman who is kind to you. She’s fond of you. I 
could tell she’s fond of you directly I heard her. 
And you amuse yourself with her. And then it’s 
Gobble, Gobble, Gobble, Great Work, Hands Clear, 
Big Business of the World. Why couldn’t you think 
of that before, Poff ? Why did you begin with her ? ” 

“It was unexpected. ...” 

“Stuff!” said Lady Marayne for a second time. 

“Well,” she said, “well. Your Mrs. Fly-by- 
Night, — oh it doesn’t matter ! — whatever she 
calls herself, must look after herself. I can’t do 
anything for her. I’m not supposed even to know 
about her. I daresay she’ll find her consolations. 
I suppose you want to go out of London and get 
away from it all. I can help you there, perhaps. 
I’m tired of London too. It’s been a tiresome 
season. Oh! tiresome and disappointing! I want 
to go over to Ireland and travel about a little. The 


202 


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Pothercareys want us to come. They’ve asked us 
twice. ...” 

Benham braced himself to face fresh difficulties. 
It was amazing how different the world could look 
from his mother’s little parlour and from the crest 
of the North Downs. 

“But I want to start round the world,” he cried 
with a note of acute distress. “I want to go to 
Egypt and India and see what is happening in the 
East, all this wonderful waking up of the East, I know 
nothing of the way the world is going — ...” 

“India!” cried Lady Marayne. “The East. 
Poff, what is the matter with you? Has something 
happened — something else ? Have you been hav- 
ing a love affair? — a real love affair?” 

“Oh, damn love affairs!” cried Benham. 
“Mother! — I’m sorry, mother! But don’t you 
see there’s other things in the world for a man than 
having a good time and making love. I’m for some- 
thing else than that. You’ve given me the splen- 
didest time — ...” 

“I see,” cried Lady Marayne, “I see. I’ve bored 
you. I might have known I should have bored 
you.” 

“You’ve not bored me!” cried Benham. 

He threw himself on the rug at her feet. “Oh, 
mother!” he said, “little, dear, gallant mother, 
don’t make life too hard for me. I’ve got to do my 
job, I’ve got to find my job.” 

“I’ve bored you,” she wept. 

Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed 


AMANDA 


203 


distressing grief of a disappointed child. She put 
her pretty be-ringed little hands in front of her face 
and recited the accumulation of her woes. 

“I’ve done all I can for you, planned for you, 
given all my time for you and I’ve bored you.” 

“Mother!” 

“Don’t come near me, Poff! Don’t touch me! 
All my plans. All my ambitions. Friends — every 
one. You don’t know all I’ve given up for 
you. . . .” 

He had never seen his mother weep before. Her 
self-abandonment amazed him. Her words were 
distorted by her tears. It was the most terrible 
and distressing of crises. . . . 

“Go away from me! How can you help me? 
All I’ve done has been a failure! Failure! Fail- 
ure!” 


§ s 

That night the silences of Finacue Street heard 
Benham’s voice again. “I must do my job,” he was 
repeating, “I must do my job. Anyhow. ...” 

And then after a long pause, like a watchword and 
just a little unsurely: “Aristocracy. ...” 

The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt 
of a second ordeal. Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved 
beautifully and this made everything tormentingly 
touching and difficult. She convinced him she was 
really in love with him, and indeed if he could have 
seen his freshness and simplicity through her experi- 
enced eyes he would have known there was sound 


204 


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reason why she should have found him exceptional. 
And when his clumsy hints of compensation could 
no longer be ignored she treated him with a soft 
indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft 
and tender. She looked at him with pained eyes and 
a quiver of the lips. What did he think she was? 
And then a little less credibly, did he think she would 
have given herself to him if she hadn’t been in love 
with him? Perhaps that was not altogether true, 
but at any rate it was altogether true to her when 
she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for 
a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation 
of giving her money. But, and that seemed odd to 
Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady Ma- 
rayne would not believe, that there was not some 
other woman in the case. He assured her and she 
seemed reassured, and then presently she was back 
at exactly the same question. Would no woman 
ever understand the call of Asia, the pride of duty, 
the desire for the world? 

One sort of woman perhaps. . . . 

It was odd that for the first time now, in the 
sunshine of Kensington Gardens, he saw the little 
gossamer lines that tell that thirty years and more 
have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the 
eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth. How 
slight it is, how invisible it has been, how suddenly 
it appears ! And the sunshine of the warm April 
afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined 
unmercenary pose, betrayed too the faintest hint 
of shabbiness in her dress. He had never noticed 


AMANDA 


205 


these shadows upon her or her setting before and 
their effect was to fill him with a strange regretful 
tenderness. . . . 

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease 
to be dazzled and admire. He had thought she 
might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might 
set herself to stir his senses, and both these expec- 
tations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he 
saw her beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and 
unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed. He 
forgot the particulars of that first lunch of theirs 
together and he remembered his mother’s second 
contemptuous ‘ ' Stuff ! ’ ’ 

Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected. 

Why hadn’t he left this little sensitive soul and 
this little sensitive body alone? And since he 
hadn’t done so, what right had he now to back out 
of their common adventure ? Pie felt a sudden wild 
impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in a mood 
between remorse and love and self-immolation, 
and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping 
stride in her paces, passed across his heavens, point- 
ing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another 
thought of the banns. . . . 

“You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won’t you?” 
said Mrs. Skelmersdale, brimming over. “You will 
do that.” 

He couldn’t keep his arm from her fit tie shoulders. 
And as their lips touched he suddenly found himself 
weeping also. . . . 

His spirit went limping from that interview. She 


206 


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chose to stay behind in her chair and think, she said, 
and each time he turned back she was sitting in the 
same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she 
had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn 
up to it. The third time he waved his hat clumsily, 
and she started and then answered with her hand. 
Then the trees hid her. . . . 

This sex business was a damnable business. If 
only because it made one hurt women. . . . 

He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had 
hurt and disappointed his mother. Was he a brute? 
Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this aris- 
tocracy? Was his belief anything more than a 
theory? Was he only dreaming of a debt to the 
men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men in the 
stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields ? And while 
he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living 
creatures in the sleep-walk of his dreaming. . . . 

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any 
rate set his face absolutely against the establish- 
ment of any further relations with women. 

Unless they were women of an entirely different 
type, women hardened and tempered, who would 
understand. 


§ 9 

So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate 
Mrs. Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time 
an entirely painful memory. But mothers are not so 
easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother 
whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary 


AMANDA 


207 


persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice 
over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham 
understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned 
again ; but somehow from the past his shadow and 
his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of 
undefined obligation upon Benham’s outlook. His 
resolution to go round the world carried on his 
preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same 
time his mother’s thwarted and angry bearing pro- 
duced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly 
in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, 
that he ought to devote his life to the little lady’s 
happiness and pride, and his reason told him that 
even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn’t ; 
the mere act of making it would produce so entirely 
catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have 
become a croquet champion or the curate of Chex- 
ington church, lines of endeavour which for him 
would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious 
scandal or manslaughter with a mallet. 

There is so little measure in the wild atonements 
of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Re- 
search Magnificent that the remorses of this period 
of Benham’s life were too complicated and scattered 
for a cumulative effect. In the background of his 
mind and less subdued than its importance could 
seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder- 
Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. 
They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite 
acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this 
delay. Lady Marayne’s moods, however, had been 


208 


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so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach 
this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion 
came he perceived in the same instant the fullest 
reasons for regretting it. 

“Ah!” she said, hanging only for a moment, and 
then: “you told me you were alone!” . . . 

Her mind leapt at once to the personification of 
these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her 
in her son since his flight from London. They were 
the enemy, they had got hold of him. 

“When I asked you if you were alone you pre- 
tended to be angry,” she remembered with a flash. 
“You said, ‘Do I tell lies?’” 

“I was alone. Until — It was an accident. 
On my walk I was alone.” 

But he flinched before her accusing, her almost 
triumphant, forefinger. 

From the instant she heard of them she hated 
these South Harting people unrestrainedly. She 
made no attempt to conceal it. Her valiant bantam 
spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the 
rare and uncongenial ache of his secession. “And 
who are they ? What are they ? What sort of 
people can they be to drag in a passing young man? 
I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening 
— Was she painted, Poff?” 

She whipped him with her questions as though 
she was slashing his face. He became dead-white 
and grimly civil, answering every question as though 
it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry. 

“Of course I don’t know who they are. How 
should I know? What need is there to know?” 


AMANDA 


209 


“ There are ways of finding out,” she insisted. 
“If I am to go down and make myself pleasant to 
these people because of you.” 

“But I implore you not to.” 

“And five minutes ago you were imploring me to ! 
Of course I shall.” 

“Oh well! — well!” 

“One has to know something of the people to whom 
one commits oneself, surely.” 

“They are decent people; they are well-behaved 
people.” 

“Oh! — I'll behave well. Don’t think I’ll dis- 
grace your casual acquaintances. But who they 
are, what they are, I will know. ...” 

On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond 
her utmost expectations. 

“Come round,” she said over the telephone, two 
mornings later. “I’ve something to tell you.” 

She was so triumphant that she was sorry for 
him. When it came to telling him, she failed from 
her fierceness. 

“Poff, my little son,” she said, “I’m so sorry I 
hardly know how to tell you. Poff, I’m sorry. I 
have to tell you — and it’s utterly beastly.” 

“But what?” he asked. 

“These people are dreadful people.” 

“But how?” 

“You’ve heard of the great Kent and Eastern 
Bank smash and the Marlborough Building Society 
frauds eight or nine years ago?” 

“Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?” 


210 


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“That man Morris.” 

She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her 
to go on. 

“Her father,” said Lady Marayne. 

“But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don’t 
remember.” 

“He was sentenced to seven years — ten years — 
I forget. He had done all sorts of dreadful things. 
He was a swindler. And when he went out of the 
dock into the waiting-room — He had a signet ring 
with prussic acid in it — . . .” 

“I remember now,” he said. 

A silence fell between them. 

Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug 
and stared very hard at the little volume of Hen- 
ley’s poetry that lay upon the table. 

He cleared his throat presently. 

“You can’t go and see them then,” he said. 
“After .all — since I am going abroad so soon — ... 
It doesn’t so very much matter.” 

§ 10 

To Benham it did not seem to be of the slightest 
importance that Amanda’s father was a convicted 
swindler who had committed suicide. Never was a 
resolved and conscious aristocrat so free from the 
hereditary delusion. Good parents, he was con- 
vinced, are only an advantage in so far as they have 
made you good stuff, and bad parents are no dis- 
credit to a son or daughter of good quality. Con- 
ceivably he had a bias against too close an exami- 


AMANDA 


211 


nation of origins, and he held that the honour of the 
children should atone for the sins of the fathers and 
the questionable achievements of any intervening 
testator. Not half a dozen rich and established 
families in all England could stand even the most 
conventional inquiry into the foundations of their 
pride, and only a universal amnesty could prevent 
ridiculous distinctions. But he brought no accu- 
sation of inconsistency against his mother. She 
looked at things with a lighter logic and a kind 
of genius for the acceptance of superficial values. 
She was condoned and forgiven, a rescued lamb, 
re-established, notoriously bright and nice, and the 
Morrises were damned. That was their status, ex- 
clusion, damnation, as fixed as colour in Georgia or 
caste in Bengal. But if his mother’s mind worked in 
that way there was no reason why his should. So far 
as he was concerned, he told himself, it did not matter 
whether Amanda was the daughter of a swindler or 
the daughter of a god. He had no doubt that she 
herself had the spirit and quality of divinity. He 
had seen it. 

So there was nothing for it in the failure of his 
mother’s civilities but to increase his own. He would 
go down to Harting and take his leave of these 
amiable outcasts himself. With a certain effusion. 
He would do this soon because he was now within 
sight of the beginning of his world tour. He had 
made his plans and prepared most of his equipment. 
Little remained to do but the release of Merkle, the 
wrappering and locking up of Finacue Street, which 


212 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


could await him indefinitely, and the buying of 
tickets. He decided to take the opportunity afforded 
by a visit of Sir Godfrey and Lady Marayne to the 
Blights, big iron people in the North of England of 
so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored 
by it. He announced his invasion in a little note 
to Mrs. Wilder. He parted from his mother on 
Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, 
a little reconciled to his project of going abroad ; 
and contrived his arrival at South Harting for that 
sunset hour which was for his imagination the natural 
halo of Amanda. 

“I’m going round the world,” he told them simply. 
“I may be away for two years, and I thought I 
would like to see you all again before I started.” 

That was quite the way they did things. 

The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, 
who displayed a curious tendency to drift in between 
Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with a By- 
ronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of 
extraordinarily mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty’s 
who had cycled down from London, and who it ap- 
peared maintained herself at large in London by 
drawing for advertisements, and a silent colourless 
friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders. The talk lit by 
Amanda’s enthusiasm circled actively round Ben- 
ham’s expedition. It was clear that the idea of giv- 
ing some years to thinking out one’s possible work in 
the world was for some reason that remained obscure 
highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and 
the Byronic youth. Betty too regarded it as levity 


AMANDA 


213 


when there was “so much to be done,” and the topic 
whacked about and rose to something like a wrangle, 
and sat down and rested and got up again reinvig- 
orated, with a continuity of interest that Benham 
had never yet encountered in any London gather- 
ing. He made a good case for his modern version 
of the Grand Tour, and he gave them something of 
his intellectual enthusiasm for the distances and 
views, the cities and seas, the multitudinous wide 
spectacle of the world he was to experience. He 
had been reading about Benares and North China. 
As he talked Amanda, who had been animated at 
first, fell thoughtful and silent. And then it was 
discovered that the night was wonderfully warm and 
the moon shining. They drifted out into the garden, 
but Mr. Rathbone-Sanders was suddenly entangled 
and drawn back by Mrs. Wilder and the young 
woman from London upon some technical point, 
and taken to the work-table in the corner of the 
dining-room to explain. He was never able to get 
to the garden. 

Benham found himself with Amanda upon a side 
path, a little isolated by some swaggering artichokes 
and a couple of apple trees and so forth from the 
general conversation. They cut themselves off from 
the continuation of that by a little silence, and then 
she spoke abruptly and with the quickness of a 
speaker who has thought out something to say and 
fears interruption: “Why did you come down 
here?” 

“I wanted to see you before I went.” 


214 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“You disturb me. You fill me with envy.” 

“I didn’t think of that. I wanted to see you 
again.” 

“And then you will go off round the world, you 
will see the Tropics, you will see India, you will go 
into Chinese cities all hung with vermilion, you will 
climb mountains. Oh! men can do all the splendid 
things. Why do you come here to remind me of it ? 
I have never been anywhere, anywhere at all. I 
never shall go anywhere. Never in my fife have I 
seen a mountain. Those Downs there — look at 
them ! — are my highest. And while you are travel- 
ling I shall think of you — and think of you. ...” 

“Would you like to travel?” he asked as though 
that was an extraordinary idea. 

“Do you think every girl wants to sit at home and 
rock a cradle?” 

“I never thought you did.” 

“Then what did you think I wanted?” 

“What do you want?” 

She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight 
shone in her eyes as she turned her face to him. 

“Just what you want,” she said; “ — the whole 
World ! 

“Life is like a feast,” she went on; “it is spread 
before everybody and nobody must touch it. What 
am I? Just a prisoner. In a cottage garden. 
Looking for ever over a hedge. I should be happier 
if I couldn’t look. I remember once, only a little 
time ago, there was a cheap excursion to London. 
Our only servant went. She had to get up at an 


AMANDA 


215 


unearthly hour, and I — I got up too. I helped her 
to get off. And when she was gone I went up to my 
bedroom again and cried. I cried with envy for any 
one, any one who could go away. I’ve been no- 
where — except to school at Chichester and three or 
four times to Emsworth and Bognor — for eight 
years. When you go” . — the tears glittered in the 
moonlight — “I shall cry. It will be worse than 
the excursion to London. . . . Ever since you were 
here before IVe been thinking of it.” 

It seemed to Benham that here indeed was the 
very sister of his spirit. His words sprang into his 
mind as one thinks of a repartee. “But why 
shouldn’t you come too?” he said. 

She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit 
faces examined each other. Both she and Benham 
were trembling. 

“Come too?” she repeated. 

“Yes, with me.” 

“But — how?” 

Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that 
is teazed; her troubled eyes looked out from under 
puckered brows. “You don’t mean it,” she said. 
“You don’t mean it.” 

And then indeed he meant it. 

“Marry me,” he said very quickly, glancing 
towards the dark group at the end of the garden. 
“And we will go together.” 

He seized her arm and drew her to him. “I love 
you,” he said. “I love your spirit. You are not 
like any one else.” 


216 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


There was a moment’s hesitation. 

Both he and she looked to see how far they were 
still alone. 

Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. 
He drew her still closer. 

“Oh!” she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. 

Their lips touched, and for a moment he held her 
lithe body against his own. 

“I want you,” he whispered close to her. “You 
are my mate. From the first sight of you I knew 
that. ...” 

They embraced — alertly furtive. 

Then they stood a little apart. Some one was 
coming towards them. Amanda’s bearing changed 
swiftly. She put up her little face to his, confidently 
and intimately. 

“Don’t tell any one,” she whispered eagerly 
shaking his arm to emphasize her words. “Don’t 
tell any one — not yet. Not for a few days. . . .” 

She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy 
form of Betty appeared in a little path between the 
artichokes and raspberry canes. 

“Listening to the nightingales?” cried Betty. 

“Yes, aren’t they?” said Amanda inconsecu- 
tively. 

“That’s our very own nightingale!” cried Betty 
advancing. “Do you hear it, Mr. Benham? No, 
not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that 
performs in the vicarage trees. ...” 


AMANDA 


217 


§11 

When a man has found and won his mate then the 
best traditions demand a lyrical interlude. It should 
be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which 
melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost 
uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the fresh- 
ness of every spring that ever was across the page, 
of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover. This 
at any rate was what White had always done in his 
novels hitherto, and what he would certainly have 
done at this point had he had the telling of Benham’s 
story uncontrolledly in his hands. But, indeed, 
indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not 
this simplicity. Only the heroes of romance, and a 
few strong simple clean-shaven Americans have that 
much emotional integrity. (And even the Ameri- 
cans do at times seem to an observant eye to be put- 
ting in work at the job and keeping up their glad- 
ness.) Benham was excited that night, but not in 
the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did 
not dance down the village street of Harting to his 
harbour at the Ship, and the expression in his eyes 
as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep 
elemental wonder one could have wished there, but 
amazement. Do not suppose that he did not love 
Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not 
triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image 
of the two armour-clad lovers was not still striding 
and flourishing through the lit wilderness of his 
imagination. For three weeks things had pointed 


218 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


him to this. They would do everything together 
now, he and his mate, they would scale mountains 
together and ride side by side towards ruined cities 
across the deserts of the World. He could have 
wished no better thing. But at the same time, even 
as he felt and admitted this and rejoiced at it, the 
sky of his mind was black with consternation. . . . 

It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned 
over the abundant but confused notes upon this per- 
plexing phase of Benham’s development that lay in 
the third drawer devoted to the Second Limitation, 
how dependent human beings are upon statement. 
Man is the animal that states a case. He lives not 
in things but in expressed ideas, and what was 
troubling Benham inordinately that night, a night 
that should have been devoted to purely blissful and 
exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of 
stating what had happened in any terms that 
would be tolerable either to Mrs. Skelmersdale or 
Lady Marayne. The thing had happened with the 
suddenness of a revelation. Whatever had been 
going on in the less illuminated parts of his mind, 
his manifest resolution had been merely to bid South 
Harting good-bye — And in short they would 
never understand. They would accuse him of the 
meanest treachery. He could see his mother’s 
face, he could hear her voice saying, “And so be- 
cause of this sudden infatuation for a swindler’s 
daughter, a girl who runs about the roads with a 
couple of retrievers hunting for a man, you must 
spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot of 


AMANDA 


219 


pretentious stuffy lies. . . And Mrs. Skelmers- 
dale too would say, “Of course he just talked of 
the world and duty and all that rubbish to save 
my face. ...” 

It wasn’t so at all. 

But it looked so frightfully like it ! 

Couldn’t they realize that he had fled out of Lon- 
don before ever he had seen Amanda? They might 
be able to do it perhaps, but they never would. It 
just happened that in the very moment when the 
edifice of his noble resolutions had been ready, she 
had stepped into it — out of nothingness and no- 
where. She wasn’t an accident ; that was just the 
point upon which they were bound to misjudge her ; 
she was an embodiment. If only he could show her 
to them as she had first shown herself to him, swift, 
light, a little flushed from running but not in the 
least out of breath, quick as a leopard upon the 
dogs. . . . But even if the improbable opportunity 
arose, he perceived it might still be impossible to 
produce the Amanda he loved, the Amanda of the 
fluttering short skirt and the clear enthusiastic voice. 
Because, already he knew she was not the only 
Amanda. There was another, there might be 
others, there was this perplexing person who had 
flashed into being at the very moment of their 
mutual confession, who had produced the entirely 
disconcerting demand that nobody must be told. 
Then Betty had intervened. But that sub-Amanda 
and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the 
first occasion, because when aristocrats love they 


220 


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don't care a rap who is told and who is not told. 
They just step out into the light side by side. . . . 

“Don’t tell any one," she had said, “not for a 
few days. ..." 

This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning 
again, flitting about in the background of a glad and 
loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda who had 
put her head down while the real Amanda flung her 
chin up and contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, 
and who was apparently engaged in disentangling 
something obscure connected with Mr. Rathbone- 
Sanders that ought never to have been entangled. . . . 

“A human being," White read, “the simplest 
human being, is a clustering mass of aspects. No 
man will judge another justly who judges every- 
thing about him. And of love in particular is this 
true. We love not persons but revelations. The 
woman one loves is like a goddess hidden in a shrine , 
for her sake we live on hope and suffer the kindred 
priestesses that make up herself. The art of love 
is patience till the gleam returns. ..." 

Sunday and Monday did much to develop this 
idea of the intricate complexity of humanity in 
Benham’s mind. On Monday morning he went up 
from the Ship again to get Amanda alone and deliver 
his ultimatum against a further secrecy, so that he 
could own her openly and have no more of the inter- 
ventions and separations that had barred him from 
any intimate talk with her throughout the whole of 
Sunday. The front door stood open, the passage 
hall was empty, but as he hesitated whether he should 


AMANDA 


221 


proclaim himself with the knocker or walk through, 
the door of the little drawing-room flew open and a 
black-clad cylindrical clerical person entirely un- 
known to Benham stumbled over the threshold, 
blundered blindly against him, made a sound like 
“Moo” and a pitiful gesture with his arm, and fled 
forth. . . . 

It was a curate and he was creeping bitterly. . . . 

Benham stood in the doorway and watched a 
clumsy broken-hearted flight down the village street. 

He had been partly told and partly left to infer, 
and anyhow he was beginning to understand about 
Mr. Rathbone-Sanders. That he could dismiss. 
But — why was the curate in tears? 

§ 12 

He found Amanda standing alone in the room 
from which this young man had fled. She had a 
handful of daffodils in her hand, and others were 
scattered over the table. She had been arranging 
the big bowl of flowers in the centre. He left the 
door open behind him and stopped short with the 
table between them. She looked up at him — intel- 
ligently and calmly. Her pose had a divine dignity. 

“I want to tell them now,” said Benham without 
a word of greeting. 

“Yes,” she said, “tell them now.” 

They heard steps in the passage outside. 
“Betty!” cried Amanda. 

Her mother’s voice answered, “Do you want 
Betty?” 


222 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“We want you all,” answered Amanda. “We 
have something to tell you. ...” 

“Carrie!” they heard Mrs. Morris call her sister 
after an interval, and her voice sounded faint and 
flat and unusual. There was the soft hissing of 
some whispered words outside and a muffled excla- 
mation. Then Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and 
Betty came into the room. Mrs. Wilder came 
first, and Mrs. Morris with an alarmed face as if 
sheltering behind her. “We want to tell you 
something,” said Amanda. 

“Amanda and I are going to marry each other,” 
said Benham, standing in front of her. 

For an instant the others made no answer; they 
looked at each other. 

“But does he know?” Mrs. Morris said in a low 
voice. 

Amanda turned her eyes to her lover. She was 
about to speak, she seemed to gather herself for an 
effort, and then he knew that he did not want to 
hear her explanation. He checked her by a ges- 
ture. 

“I know” he said, and then, “I do not see that it 
matters to us in the least.” 

He went to her holding out both his hands to 
her. 

She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and 
then the watchful gravity of her face broke into soft 
emotion. “Oh!” she cried and seized his face be- 
tween her hands in a passion of triumphant love and 
kissed him. 


AMANDA 


223 


And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. 
Morris. 

She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thank- 
fulness, with relief, as if in the act of kissing she 
transferred to him precious and entirely incalculable 
treasures. 


CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
The Spirited Honeymoon 
§1 

It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in 
September that Benham came up on to the deck of 
the sturdy Austrian steamboat that was churning its 
way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to 
Cattaro, and lit himself a cigarette and seated him- 
self upon a deck chair. Save for a yawning Greek 
sailor busy with a mop the first-class deck was 
empty. 

Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the 
Illyrian coast. The mountains rose gaunt and 
enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic silhouette 
against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still 
plunged in blue shadow, broke only into a little cold 
green and white edge of olive terraces and vegeta- 
tion and houses before they touched the clear blue 
water. An occasional church or a house perched 
high upon some seemingly inaccessible ledge did but 
accentuate the vast barrenness of the land. It was 
a land desolated and destroyed. At Ragusa, at 
Salona, at Spalato and Zara and Pola Benham had 
seen only variations upon one persistent theme, a 
dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst 
224 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


225 


the giant ruins of preceding times, as worms live in 
the sockets of a skull. Forward an unsavoury 
group of passengers still slumbered amidst fruit-peel 
and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid 
brigands armed with preposterous red umbrellas, 
a group of curled-up human lumps brooded over by 
an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like 
a horse, his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl. 
Benham surveyed these last products of the “life 
force” and resumed his pensive survey^ of the coast. 
The sea was deserted save for a couple of little 
lateen craft with suns painted on their gaudy sails, 
sea butterflies that hung motionless as if unawakened 
close inshore. . . . 

The travel of the last few weeks had impressed 
Benham’s imagination profoundly. For the first 
time in his life he had come face to face with civil- 
ization in defeat. From Venice hitherward he had 
marked with cumulative effect the clustering evi- 
dences of effort spent and power crumbled to noth- 
ingness. He had landed upon the marble quay of 
Pola and visited its deserted amphitheatre, he had 
seen a weak provincial life going about ignoble ends 
under the walls of the great Venetian fortress and 
the still more magnificent cathedral of Zara; he 
had visited Spalato, clustered in sweltering grime 
within the ample compass of the walls of Diocletian’s 
villa, and a few troublesome sellers of coins and iri- 
descent glass and fragments of tessellated pavement 
and such-like loot was all the population he had 
found amidst the fallen wall? and broken friezes and 

Q 


226 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


columns of Salona. Down this coast there ebbed 
and flowed a mean residual life, a life of violence and 
dishonesty, peddling trades, vendettas and war. 
For a while the unstable Austrian ruled this land and 
made a sort of order that the incalculable chances of 
international politics might at any time shatter. 
Benham was drawing near now to the utmost limit 
of that extended peace. Ahead beyond the moun- 
tain capes was Montenegro and, further, Albania 
and Macedonia, lands of lawlessness and confusion. 
Amanda and he had been warned of the impossi- 
bility of decent travel beyond Cattaro and Cettinje* 
but this had but whetted her adventurousness and 
challenged his spirit. They were going to see Al- 
bania for themselves. 

The three months of honeymoon they had been 
spending together had developed many remarkable 
divergences of their minds that had not been in the 
least apparent to Benham before their marriage. 
Then their common resolve to be as spirited as pos- 
sible had obliterated all minor considerations. But 
that was the limit of their unanimity. Amanda 
loved wild and picturesque things, and Benham 
strong and clear things; the vines and brushwood 
amidst the ruins of Salona that had delighted her 
had filled him with a sense of tragic retrogression. 
Salona had revived again in the acutest form a dis- 
pute that had been smouldering between them 
throughout a fitful and lengthy exploration of north 
and central Italy. She could not understand his 
disgust with the mediaeval colour and confusion 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


227 


that had swamped the pride and state of the Roman 
empire, and he could not make her feel the ambition 
of the ruler, the essential discipline and responsi- 
bilities of his aristocratic idea. While his adven- 
turousness was conquest, hers, it was only too mani- 
fest, was brigandage. His thoughts ran now into 
the form of an imaginary discourse, that he would 
never deliver to her, on the decay of states, on the 
triumphs of barbarians over rulers who will not rule, 
on the relaxation of patrician orders and the return 
of the robber and assassin as lordship decays. This 
coast was no theatrical scenery for him; it was a 
shattered empire. And it was shattered because no 
men had been found, united enough, magnificent and 
steadfast enough, to hold the cities, and maintain 
the roads, keep the peace and subdue the brutish 
hates and suspicions and cruelties that devastated 
the world. 

And as these thoughts came back into his mind, 
Amanda flickered up from below, light and noiseless 
as a sunbeam, and stood behind his chair. 

Freedom and the sight of the world had if pos- 
sible brightened and invigorated her. Her costume 
and bearing were subtly touched by^the romance 
of the Adriatic. There was a flavour of the pirate 
in the cloak about her shoulders and the light knitted 
cap of scarlet she had stuck upon her head. She 
surveyed his preoccupation for a moment, glanced 
forward, and then covered his eyes with her hands. 
In almost the same movement she had bent down 
and nipped the tip of his ear between her teeth. 


228 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ Confound you, Amanda!” 

“ You’d forgotten my existence, you star-gazing 
Cheetah. And then, you see, these things happen 
to you !” 

“I was thinking.” 

“Well — don't. ... I distrust your thinking. 
. . . This coast is wilder and grimmer than yester- 
day. It's glorious. ...” 

She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her. 

“Is there nothing to eat?” she asked abruptly. 
“It is too early.” 


§2 

“This coast is magnificent,” she said presently. 

“It's hideous,” he answered. “It’s as ugly as a 
heap of slag.” 

“It’s nature at its wildest.” 

“That’s Amanda at her wildest.” 

“Well, isn’t it?” 

“No! This land isn’t nature. It’s waste. Not 
wilderness. It’s the other end. Those hills were 
covered with forests ; this was a busy civilized coast 
just a little thousand years ago. The Venetians 
wasted it. They cut down the forests ; they filled 
the cities with a mixed mud of population, that 
stuff. Look at it”! — he indicated the sleepers 
forward by a movement of his head. 

“I suppose they were rather feeble people,” said 
Amanda. 

“Who?” 

“The Venetians.” 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


229 


“ They were traders — and nothing more. Just as 
we are. And when they were rich they got splendid 
clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we do.” 

Amanda surveyed him. “We don't rest.” 

“We idle.” 

“We are seeing things.” 

“Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making 
love. Just as they did. And it has been — rip- 
ping. In Salona they made love tremendously. 
They did nothing else until the barbarians came over 
the mountains. ...” 

“Well,” said Amanda virtuously, “we will do 
something else.” 

He made no answer and her expression became 
profoundly thoughtful. Of course this wandering- 
must end. He had been growing impatient for some 
time. But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide 
just what to do with him. . . . 

Benham picked up the thread of his musing. 

He was seeing more and more clearly that all 
civilization was an effort, and so far always an inade- 
quate and very partially successful effort. Always 
it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that 
it was the work of minorities, who took power, who 
had a common resolution against the inertia, the 
indifference, the insubordination and instinctive 
hostility of the mass of mankind. And always the 
set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been 
failures of the aristocratic spirit. Why had the 
Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled? Every 
order, every brotherhood, every organization car- 


230 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

ried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Must 
the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, 
reclothe itself in new forms, age, die, even as life 
does — making each time its almost infinitesimal 
addition to human achievement? Now the world 
is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that 
orders and controls. Human affairs sway at a dizzy 
height of opportunity. Will they keep their foot- 
ing there, or stagger? We have got back at last to a 
time as big with opportunity as the early empire. 
Given only the will in men and it would be possible 
now to turn the dazzling accidents of science, the 
chancy attainments of the nineteenth century, into 
a sane and permanent possession, a new starting- 
point. . . . What a magnificence might be made 
of life ! 

He was aroused by Amanda’s voice. 

“When we go back to London, old Cheetah,” she 
said, “we must take a house.” 

For some moments he stared at her, trying to get 
back to their point of divergence. 

“Why?” he asked at length. 

“We must have a house,” she said. 

He looked at her face. Her expression was 
profoundly thoughtful, her eyes were fixed on the 
slumbering ships poised upon the transparent water 
under the mountain shadows. 

“You see,” she thought it out, “you’ve got to tell 
in London. You can’t just sneak back there. 
You’ve got to strike a note of your own. With all 
these things of yours.” 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


231 


“But how?” 

“There’s a sort of little house, I used to see them 
when I was a girl and my father lived in London, 
about Brook Street and that part. Not too far 
north. ... You see going back to London for us 
is just another adventure. We’ve got to capture 
London. We’ve got to scale it. We’ve got advan- 
tages of all sorts. But at present we’re outside. 
We’ve got to march in.” 

Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and 
triumphs. 

She was roused by Benham’s voice. 

“What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?” 

She turned her level eyes to his. “London,” she 
said. “For you.” 

“I don’t want London,” he said. 

“I thought you did. You ought to. I do.” 

“But to take a house! Make an invasion of 
London !” 

“You dear old Cheetah, you can’t be always 
frisking about in the wilderness, staring at the 
stars.” 

“But I’m not going back to live in London in the 
old way, theatres, dinner-parties, chatter — ” 

“ Oh no ! We aren’t going to do that sort of thing. 
We aren’t going to join the ruck. We’ll go about 
in holiday times all over the world. I want to see 
Fusiyama. I mean to swim in the South Seas. 
With you. We’ll dodge the sharks. But all the 
same we shall have to have a house in London. We 
have to be felt there.” 


232 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her 
fine eyebrows. Her little face conveyed a protesting 
reasonableness. 

“Well, mustn't we?” 

She added, “If we want to alter the world we ought 
to live in the world.” 

Since last they had disputed the question she had 
thought out these new phrases. 

“Amanda,” he said, “I think sometimes you 
haven't the remotest idea of what I am after. I 
don't believe you begin to suspect what I am up to.” 

She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin 
between her hands and regarded him impudently. 
She had a characteristic trick of looking up with her 
face downcast that never failed to soften his regard. 

“Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your 
early morning habit of calling your own true love a 
fool,” she said. 

“Simply I tell you I will not go back to Lon- 
don.” 

“You will go back with me, Cheetah.” 

“I will go back as far as my work calls me there.” 

“It calls you through the voice of your mate and 
slave and doormat to just exactly the sort of house 
you ought to have. ... It is the privilege and 
duty of the female to choose the lair.” 

For a space Benham made no reply. This con- 
troversy had been gathering for some time and he 
wanted to state his view as vividly as possible. 
The Benham style of connubial conversation had 
long since decided for emphasis rather than delicacy. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


233 


“I think/’ he said slowly, “that this wanting to 
take London by storm is a beastly vulgar thing to 
want to do.” 

Amanda compressed her lips. 

“I want to work out things in my mind,” he went 
on. “I do not want to be distracted by social 
things, and I do not want to be distracted by pic- 
turesque things. This life — it’s all very well on 
the surface, but it isn’t real. I’m not getting hold 
of reality. Things slip away from me. God ! 
but how they slip away from me!” 

He got up and walked to the side of the boat. 

She surveyed his back for some moments. Then 
she went and leant over the rail beside him. 

“I want to go to London,” she said. 

“I don’t.” 

“Where do you want to go?” 

“Where I can see into the things that hold the 
world together.” 

“I have loved this wandering — I could wander 
always. But . . . Cheetah! I tell you I want to 
go to London.” 

He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. 
“Wo,” he said. 

“But, I ask you.” 

He shook his head. 

She put her face closer and whispered. “Cheetah ! 
big beast of my heart. Do you hear your mate 
asking for something?” 

He turned his eyes back to the mountains. “I 
must go my own way.” 


234 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ Haven’t I, so far, invented things, made life 
amusing, Cheetah? Can't you trust the leopard's 
wisdom?" 

He stared at the coast inexorably. 

“I wonder," she whispered. 

“What?" 

“You are that, Cheetah, that lank, long, eager 
beast — ." 

Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbottoned 
and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She stuck her 
pretty blue- veined arm before his eyes. “Look 
here, sir, it was you, wasn't it ? It was your power- 
ful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defence- 
less young leopardess — " 

“Amanda !" 

“Well." She wrinkled her brows. 

He turned about and stood over her, he shook a 
finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity 
in his voice as he spoke. 

“Look here, Amanda!" he said, “if you think 
that you are going to make me agree to any sort of 
project about London, to any sort of complication of 
our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign 
of social assertion — by that , then may I be damned 
for an uxorious fool!" 

Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her 
eyes. 

“This, Cheetah, is the morning mood," she 
remarked. 

“This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda — " 

He stopped short. He looked towards the gang- 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


235 


way, they both looked. The magic word “ Break- 
fast’ ^ ’ came simultaneously from them. 

“Eggs,” she said ravenously, and led the way. 

A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald’s trumpet 
had called a truce between them. 

§3 

Their marriage had been a comparatively incon- 
spicuous one, but since that time they had been 
engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and 
variety. Their wedding had taken place at South 
Harting church in the marked absence of Lady 
Marayne, and it had been marred by only one un- 
toward event. The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in 
spite of the earnest advice of several friends had 
insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had suddenly 
covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and 
fled with a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an up- 
roar of inadequately smothered sorrow came as an 
obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages 
of the service. Amanda appeared unaware of the 
incident at the time, but afterwards she explained 
things to Benham. “ Curates,” she said, “are such 
pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember 
that. But he never had anything to go upon at all 
— not anything — except his own imaginations.” 

“I suppose when you met him you were nice to 
him.” 

“I was nice to him, of course. ...” 

They drove away from Harting, as it were, over 
the weeping remains of this infatuated divine. His 


236 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and then 
Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot 
about him, and their honeymoon became so active 
and entertaining that only very rarely and transi- 
torily did they ever think of him again. 

The original conception of their honeymoon had 
been identical with the plans Benham had made for 
the survey and study of the world, and it was 
through a series of modifications, replacements and 
additions that it became at last a prolonged and 
very picturesque tour in Switzerland, the Austrian 
Tyrol, North Italy, and down the Adriatic coast. 
Amanda had never seen mountains, and longed, 
she said, to climb. This took them first to Switzer- 
land. Then, in spite of their exalted aims, the devo- 
tion of their lives to noble purposes, it was evident 
that Amanda had no intention of scamping the de- 
tail of love, and for that what background is so richly 
beautiful as Italy? An important aspect of the 
grand tour round the world as Benham had planned 
it, had been interviews, inquiries and conversations 
with every sort of representative and understand- 
ing person he could reach. An unembarrassed 
young man who wants to know and does not promise 
to bore may reach almost any one in that way, he 
is as impersonal as pure reason and as mobile as a 
letter, but the presence of a lady in his train leaves 
him no longer unembarrassed. His approach has 
become a social event. The wife of a great or sig- 
nificant personage must take notice or decide not 
to take notice. Of course Amanda was prepared 


s:he spirited honeymoon 


237 


§0 go anywhere, just as Benham’s shadow; it was 
the world that was unprepared. And a second 
leading aspect of his original scheme had been the 
examination of the ways of government in cities 
and the shifting and mixture of nations and races. 
It would have led to back streets, and involved and 
complicated details, and there was something in 
the fine flame of girlhood beside him that he felt 
was incompatible with those shadows and that dust. 
And also they were lovers and very deeply in love. 
It was amazing how swiftly that draggled shameful 
London sparrow-gamin, Eros, took heart from 
Amanda, and became wonderful, beautiful, glowing, 
life-giving, confident, clear-eyed; how he changed 
from flesh to sweet fire, and grew until he filled the 
sky. So that you see they went to Switzerland and 
Italy at last very like two ordinary young people 
who were not aristocrats at all, had no theory about 
the world or their destiny, but were simply just 
ardently delighted with the discovery of one another. 

Nevertheless Benham was for some time under 
a vague impression that in a sort of way still he 
was going round the world and working out his 
destinies. 

It was part of the fascination of Amanda that she 
was never what he had supposed her to be, and that 
nothing that he set out to do with her ever turned 
out as they had planned it. Her appreciations 
marched before her achievement, and when it came 
to climbing it seemed foolish to toil to summits over 
which her spirit had flitted days before. Their 


238 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Swiss expeditions which she had foreseen as glori- 
ous wanderings amidst the blue ice of crevasses and 
nights of exalted hardihood became a walking tour 
of fitful vigour and abundant fun and delight. They 
spent a long day on the ice of the Aletsch glacier, 
but they reached the inn on its eastward side with 
magnificent appetites a little late for dinner. 

Amanda had revealed an unexpected gift for nick- 
names and pretty fancies. She named herself the 
Leopard, the spotless Leopard; in some obscure 
way she intimated that the colour was black, but 
that was never to be admitted openly, there was 
supposed to be some lurking traces of a rusty brown 
but the word was spotless and the implication white, 
a dazzling white, she would play a thousand varia- 
tions on the theme; in moments of despondency 
she was only a black cat, a common lean black cat, 
and sacks and half-bricks almost too good for her. 
But Benham was always a Cheetah. That had 
come to her as a revelation from heaven. But so 
clearly he was a Cheetah. He was a Hunting 
Leopard ; the only beast that has an up-cast face 
and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded 
eyes like a man. She laced their journeys with a 
fantastic monologue telling in the third person what 
the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and 
seeing and doing. And so they walked up moun- 
tains and over passes and swam in the warm clear 
water of romantic lakes and loved each other mightily 
always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and 
flower-starred alps and pine forests and awning- 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


239 


covered boats, and by sunset and moonlight and 
starshine ; and out of these agreeable solitudes they 
came brown and dusty, striding side by side into 
sunlit entertaining fruit-piled market-places and 
envious hotels. For days and weeks together it 
did not seem to Benham that there was anything 
that mattered in life but Amanda and the elemental 
joys of living. And then the Research Magnificent 
began to stir in him again. He perceived that Italy 
was not India, that the clue to the questions he must 
answer lay in the crowded new towns that they 
avoided, in the packed bookshops and the talk of 
men, and not in the picturesque and flowery soli- 
tudes to which their lovemaking carried them. 

Moods began in which he seemed to forget 
Amanda altogether. 

This happened first in the Certosa di Pavia whither 
they had gone one afternoon from Milan. That 
was quite soon after they were married. They had 
a bumping journey thither in a motor-car, a little 
doubtful if the excursion was worth while, and they 
found a great amazement in the lavish beauty and 
decorative wealth of that vast church and its asso- 
ciated cloisters, set far away from any population 
as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and 
patchy cultivation. The distilleries and outbuild- 
ings were deserted — their white walls were covered 
by one monstrously great and old wisteria in flower 
— the soaring marvellous church was in possession 
of a knot of unattractive guides. One of these con- 
ducted them through the painted treasures of the 


240 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


gold and marble chapels; he was an elderly but 
animated person who evidently found Amanda 
more wonderful than any church. He poured out 
great accumulations of information and compli- 
ments before her. Benham dropped behind, went 
astray and was presently recovered dreaming in the 
great cloister. The guide showed them over two of 
the cells that opened thereupon, each a delightful 
house for a solitary, bookish and clean, and each with 
a little secret walled garden of its own. He was 
covertly tipped against all regulations and departed 
regretfully with a beaming dismissal from Amanda. 
She found Benham wondering why the Carthusians 
had failed to produce anything better in the world 
than a liqueur. “One might have imagined that 
men would have done something in this beautiful 
quiet ; that there would have come thought from 
here or will from here.” 

“In these dear little nests they ought to have put 
lovers,” said Amanda. 

“Oh, of course, you would have made the place 
Thelema. ...” 

But as they went shaking and bumping back 
along the evil road to Milan, he fell into a deep 
musing. Suddenly he said, “Work has to be done. 
Because this order or that has failed, there is no 
reason why we should fail. And look at those 
ragged children in the road ahead of us, and those 
dirty women sitting in the doorways, and the foul 
ugliness of these gaunt nameless towns through 
which we go ! They are what they are, because we 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


241 


are what we are — idlers, excursionists. In a world 
we ought to rule. . . . 

“ Amanda, we’ve got to get to work. . . .” 

That was his first display of this new mood, which 
presently became a common one. He was less and 
less content to let the happy hours slip by, more and 
more sensitive to the reminders in giant ruin and 
deserted cell, in a chance encounter with a string of 
guns and soldiers on their way to manoeuvres or in 
the sight of a stale newspaper, of a great world pro- 
cess going on in which he was now playing no part at 
all. And a curious irritability manifested itself 
more and more plainly, whenever human pettiness 
obtruded upon his attention, whenever some trivial 
dishonesty, some manifest slovenliness, some spirit- 
less failure, a cheating waiter or a wayside beggar 
brought before him the shiftless, selfish, aimless 
elements in humanity that war against the great 
dream of life made glorious. “ Accursed things,” he 
would say, as he flung some importunate cripple at a 
church door a ten-centime piece; “why were they 
born? Why do they consent to live? They are 
no better than some chance fungus that is because it 
must.” 

“It takes all sorts to make a world,” said Amanda. 

“Nonsense,” said Benham. “Where is the mega- 
therium? That sort of creature has to go. Our 
sort of creature has to end it.” 

“Then why did you give it money?” 

“Because — I don’t want the thing to be more 
wretched than it is. But if I could prevent more 


242 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


of them — . . . What am I doing to prevent 
them?” 

“ These beggars annoy you,” said Amanda after 
a pause. “They do me. Let us go back into the 
mountains.” 

But he fretted in the mountains. 

They made a ten days’ tour from Macugnaga over 
the Monte Moro to Sass, and thence to Zermatt and 
back by the Theodule to Macugnaga. The sudden 
apparition of douaniers upon the Monte Moro 
annoyed Benham, and he was also irritated by the 
solemn English mountain climbers at Saas Fee. 
They were as bad as golfers, he said, and reflected 
momentarily upon his father. Amanda fell in love 
with Monte Rosa, she wanted to kiss its snowy fore- 
head, she danced like a young goat down the path 
to Mattmark, and rolled on the turf when she came 
to gentians and purple primulas. Benham was 
tremendously in love with her most of the time, but 
one day when they were sitting over the Findelen 
glacier his perceptions blundered for the first time 
upon the fundamental antagonism of their quality. 
She was sketching out jolly things that they were 
to do together, expeditions, entertainments, amuse- 
ments, and adventures, with a voluble swiftness, and 
suddenly in a flash his eyes were opened, and he saw 
that she would never for a moment feel the quality 
that made life worth while for him. He saw it in 
a flash, and in that flash he made his urgent resolve 
not to see it. From that moment forth his bearing 
was poisoned by his secret determination not to 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


243 


think of this, not to admit it to his mind. And 
forbidden to come into his presence in its proper 
form, this conflict of intellectual temperaments took 
on strange disguises, and the gathering tension of 
his mind sought to relieve itself along grotesque 
irrelevant channels. 

There was, for example, the remarkable affair of 
the drive from Macugnaga to Piedimulera. 

They had decided to walk down in a leisurely 
fashion, but with the fatigues of the precipitous 
clamber down from Switzerland still upon them they 
found the white road between rock above and gorge 
below wearisome, and the valley hot in the late 
morning sunshine, and already before they reached 
the inn they had marked for lunch Amanda had 
suggested driving the rest of the way. The inn had 
a number of brigand-like customers consuming such 
sustenance as garlic and salami and wine ; it received 
them with an indifference that bordered on disre- 
spect, until the landlord, who seemed to be some- 
thing of a beauty himself, discovered the merits of 
Amanda. Then he became markedly attentive. 
He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with 
beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air 
of great gentility, and when he had welcomed his 
guests and driven off the slatternly waiting-maid, 
and given them his best table, and consented, at 
Amanda’s request, to open a window, he went away 
and put on a tie and collar. It was an attention so 
conspicuous that even the group of men in the far 
corner noticed and commented on it, and then they 


244 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


commented on Amanda and Benham, assuming an 
ignorance of Italian in the visitors that was only 
partly justifiable. “Bellissima,” “bravissima,” 
“signorina,” “Inglesa,” one need not be born in 
Italy to understand such words as these. Also 
they addressed sly comments and encouragements 
to the landlord as he went to and fro. 

Benham was rather still and stiff during the meal, 
but it ill becomes an English aristocrat to discuss 
the manners of an alien population, and Amanda 
was amused by the effusion of the landlord and a 
little disposed to experiment upon him. She sat 
radiating light amidst the shadows. 

The question of the vehicle was broached. The 
landlord was doubtful, then an idea, it was mani- 
festly a questionable idea, occurred to him. He 
went to consult an obscure brown-faced individual 
in the corner, disappeared, and the world without 
became eloquent. Presently he returned and an- 
nounced that a carozza was practicable. It had 
been difficult, but he had contrived it. And he 
remained hovering over the conclusion of their 
meal, asking questions about Amanda’s mountain- 
eering and expressing incredulous admiration. 

His bill, which he presented with an uneasy flour- 
ish, was large and included the carozza. 

He ushered them out to the carriage with civilities 
and compliments. It had manifestly been difficult 
and contrived. It was dusty and blistered, there 
had been a hasty effort to conceal its recent use as 
a hen-roost, the harness was mended with string. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


245 


The horse was gaunt and scandalous, a dirty white, 
and carried its head apprehensively. The driver 
had but one eye, through which there gleamed a 
concentrated hatred of God and man. 

“No wonder he charged for it before we saw it,” 
said Benham. 

“It’s better than walking,” said Amanda. 

The company in the inn gathered behind the land- 
lord and scrutinized Amanda and Benham intelli- 
gently. The young couple got in. “Avanti,” said 
Benham, and Amanda bestowed one last ineradi- 
cable memory on the bowing landlord. 

Benham did not speak until just after they turned 
the first corner, and then something portentous 
happened, considering the precipitous position of 
the road they were upon. A small boy appeared 
sitting in the grass by the wayside, and at the sight 
of him the white horse shied extravagantly. The 
driver rose in his seat ready to jump. But the 
crisis passed without a smash. “Cheetah!” cried 
Amanda suddenly. “This isn’t safe.” “Ah!” said 
Benham, and began to act with the vigour of one 
who has long accumulated force. He rose in his 
place and gripped the one-eyed driver by the collar. 
“ Aspetto ,” he said, but he meant “Stop!” The 
driver understood that he meant “Stop,” and obeyed. 

Benham wasted no time in parleying with the 
driver. He indicated to him and to Amanda by a 
comprehensive gesture that he had business with 
the landlord, and with a gleaming appetite upon his 
face went running back towards the inn. 


246 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


The landlord was sitting down to a little game of 
dominoes with his friends when Benham reappeared 
in the sunlight of the doorway. There was no mis- 
understanding Benham’s expression. 

For a moment the landlord was disposed to be 
defiant. Then he changed his mind. Benham’s 
earnest face was within a yard of his own, and a 
threatening forefinger was almost touching his nose. 

“Albergo cattivissimo,” said Benham. “Cattivis- 
simo! Pranzo cattivissimo ’orrido. Cavallo catti- 
vissimo, danger ousissimo. Gioco abominablissimo, 
damnissimo. Capisce. Eh?” * 

The landlord made deprecatory gestures. 

11 You understand all right,” said Benham. “Da 
me il argento per il carozzo. Subito?” f 

The landlord was understood to ask whether the 
signor no longer wished for the carriage. 

“Subito!” cried Benham, and giving way to a long- 
restrained impulse seized the padrone by the collar of 
his coat and shook him vigorously. 

There were dissuasive noises from the company, 
but no attempt at rescue. Benham released his hold. 
“Adesso !” { said Benham. 

The landlord decided to disgorge. It was at any 
rate a comfort that the beautiful lady was not seeing 
anything of this. And he could explain afterwards 

* This is vile Italian. It may — with a certain charity to 
Benham — be rendered: “The beastliest inn! The beastliest! 
The beastliest, most awful lunch ! The vilest horse ! Most 
dangerous! Abominable trick! Understand? ” 

f “ Give me back the money for the carriage. Quickly ! ” 
t “Now!”, 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


247 


to his friends that the Englishman was clearly a luna- 
tic, deserving pity rather than punishment. He 
made some sound of protest, but attempted no 
delay in refunding the money Benham had prepaid. 

Outside sounded the wheels of the returning car- 
riage. They stopped. Amanda appeared in the 
doorway and discovered Benham dominant. 

He was a little short of breath, and as she came in 
he was addressing the landlord with much earnest- 
ness in the following compact sentences. 

“Attendez! Ecco ! Adesso noi andiamo con 
questa cattivissimo cavallo a Piedimulera. Si noi 
arrivero in safety, securo that is, pagaremo. Non 
altro. Si noi abbiamo accidento Dio — Dio have 
mercy on your sinful soul. See! Capisce? That’s 
all.”* 

He turned to Amanda. “Get back into the 
thing,” he said. “We won’t have these stinking 
beasts think we are afraid of the job. I’ve just 
made sure he won’t have a profit by it if we smash 
up. That’s all. I might have known what he was 
up to when he wanted the money beforehand.” He 
came to the doorway and with a magnificent gesture 
commanded the perplexed driver to turn the carriage. 

While that was being done he discoursed upon his 
adjacent fellow-creatures. “A man who pays before- 
hand for anything in this filthy sort of life is a fool. 
You see the standards of the beast. They think of 

* “ Now we will go with this beastly horse to Piedimulera. 
If we get there safely I will pay. If we have an accident, 
then ” 


248 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


nothing but their dirty little tricks to get profit, their 
garlic, their sour wine, their games of dominoes, 
their moments of lust. They crawl in this place like 
cockroaches in a warm corner of the fireplace until 
they die. Look at the scabby frontage of the 
house. Look at the men’s faces. . . . Yes. So ! 
Adequato. Aspettate. . . . Get back into the 
carriage, Amanda.” 

“You know it’s dangerous, Cheetah. The horse is 
a shier. That man is blind in one eye.” 

“Get back into the carriage,” said Benham, 
whitely angry. “I am going to drive /” 

“But — !” 

Just for a moment Amanda looked scared. Then 
with a queer little laugh she jumped in again. 

Amanda was never a coward when there was 
excitement afoot. “We’ll smash !” she cried, by no 
means woefully. 

“Get up beside me,” said Benham speaking in 
English to the driver but with a gesture that trans- 
lated him. Power over men radiated from Benham 
in this angry mood. He took the driver’s seat. 
The little driver ascended and then with a grim 
calmness that brooked no resistance Benham reached 
over, took and fastened the apron over their knees 
to prevent any repetition of the jumping out tactics. 

The recovering landlord became voluble in the 
doorway. 

“In Piedimulera pagero,” said Benham over his 
shoulder and brought the whip across the white 
outstanding ribs. “Get up !” said Benham. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


249 


Amanda gripped the sides of the seat as the car- 
riage started into motion. 

He laid the whip on again with such vigour that 
the horse forgot altogether to shy at the urchin that 
had scared it before. 

“Amanda,” said Benham leaning back. “If we 
do happen to go over on that side, jump out. It’s all 
clear and wide for you. This side won’t matter so — ” 

“Mind!” screamed Amanda and recalled him to 
his duties. He was off the road and he had narrowly 
missed an outstanding chestnut true. 

“No, you don’t,” said Benham presently, and 
again their career became erratic for a time as after a 
slight struggle he replaced the apron over the knees 
of the deposed driver. It had been furtively released. 
After that Benham kept an eye on it that might have 
been better devoted to the road. 

The road went down in a series of curves and 
corners. Now and then there were pacific interludes 
when it might have been almost any road. Then, 
again, it became specifically an Italian mountain 
road. Now and then only a row of all too infrequent 
granite stumps separated them from a sheer precipice. 
Some of the corners were miraculous, and once they 
had a wheel in a ditch for a time, they shaved the 
parapet of a bridge over a gorge and they drove a 
cyclist into a patch of maize, they narrowly missed 
a goat and jumped three gullies, thrice the horse 
stumbled and was jerked up in time, there were 
sickening moments, and withal they got down to 
Piedimulera unbroken and unspilt. It helped per- 


250 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


haps that the brake, with its handle like a barrel 
organ, had been screwed up before Benham took 
control. And when they were fairly on the level 
outside the town Benham suddenly pulled up, 
relinquished the driving into the proper hands and 
came into the carriage with Amanda. 

“Safe now,” he said compactly. 

The driver appeared to be murmuring prayers 
very softly as he examined the brake. 

Amanda was struggling with profound problems. 
“Why didn’t you drive down in the first place?” she 
asked. “Without going back.” 

“The landlord annoyed me,” he said. “I had to 
go back. ... I wish I had kicked him. Hairy 
beast ! If anything had happened, you see, he would 
have had his mean money. I couldn’t bear to leave 
him.” 

“And why didn’t you let him drive?” She 
indicated the driver by a motion of the head. 

“I was angry,” said Benham. “I was angry at the 
whole thing.” 

“Still—” 

“You see I think I did that because he might have 
jumped off if I hadn’t been up there to prevent him 
— I mean if we had had a smash. I didn’t want him 
to get out of it.” 

“But you too — ” 

“You see I was angry. . . .” 

“It’s been as good as a switchback,” said Amanda 
after reflection. “But weren’t you a little careless 
about me, Cheetah?” 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


251 


“I never thought of you,” said Benham, and then 
as if he felt that inadequate : “ You see — I was so 
annoyed. It's odd at times how annoyed one gets. 
Suddenly when that horse shied I realized what a 
beastly business life was — as those brutes up there 
live it. I want to clear out the whole hot, dirty, 
little aimless nest of them. . . .” 

“No, I’m sure,” he repeated after a pause as 
though he had been digesting something, “I wasn’t 
thinking about you at all.” 

§4 

The suppression of his discovery that his honey- 
moon was not in the least the great journey of world 
exploration he had intended, but merely an impulsive 
pleasure hunt, was by no means the only obscured 
and repudiated conflict that disturbed the mind and 
broke out upon the behaviour of Benham. Beneath 
that issue he was keeping down a far more intimate 
conflict. It was in those lower, still less recognized 
depths that the volcanic fire arose and the earth- 
quakes gathered strength. The Amanda he had 
loved, the Amanda of the gallant stride and fluttering 
skirt was with him still, she marched rejoicing over 
the passes, and a dearer Amanda, a soft whispering 
creature with dusky hair, who took possession of 
him when she chose, a soft creature who was never- 
theless a fierce creature, was also interwoven with 
his life. But — But there was now also a multi- 
tude of other Amandas who had this in common that 
they roused him to opposition, that they crossed 


252 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


his moods and jarred upon his spirit. And partic- 
ularly there was the Conquering Amanda not so 
much proud of her beauty as eager to test it, so that 
she was not unmindful of the stir she made in hotel 
lounges, nor of the magic that may shine memorably 
through the most commonplace incidental conversa- 
tion. This Amanda was only too manifestly pleased to 
think that she made peasant lovers discontented and 
hotel porters unmercenary; she let her light shine 
before men. We lovers, who had deemed our own 
subjugation a profound privilege, love not this 
further expansiveness of our lady’s empire. But 
Benham knew that no aristocrat can be jealous; 
jealousy he held to be the vice of the hovel and 
farmstead and suburban villa, and at an enormous 
expenditure of will he ignored Amanda’s waving 
flags and roving glances. So, too, he denied that 
Amanda who was sharp and shrewd about money 
matters, that flash of an Amanda who was greedy for 
presents and possessions, that restless Amanda who 
fretted at any cessation of excitement, and that 
darkly thoughtful Amanda whom chance observa- 
tions and questions showed to be still considering an 
account she had to settle with Lady Marayne. He 
resisted these impressions, he shut them out of his 
mind, but still they worked into his thoughts, and 
presently he could find himself asking, even as he 
and she went in step striding side by side through 
the red-scarred pinewoods in the most perfect out- 
ward harmony, whether after all he was so happily 
mated as he declared himself to be a score of times a 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


253 


day, whether he wasn’t catching glimpses of reality 
through a veil of delusion that grew thinner and 
thinner and might leave him disillusioned in the 
face of a relationship — 

Sometimes a man may be struck by a thought as 
though he had been struck in the face, and when the 
name of Mrs. Skelmersdale came into his head, he 
glanced at his wife by his side as if it were something 
that she might well have heard. Was this indeed the 
same thing as that? Wonderful, fresh as the day 
of Creation, clean as flame, yet the same ! Was 
Amanda indeed the sister of Mrs. Skelmersdale — 
wrought of clean fire, but her sister ? . . . 

But also beside the inimical aspects which could 
set such doubts afoot there were in her infinite variety 
yet other Amandas neither very dear nor very annoy- 
ing, but for the most part delightful, who entertained 
him as strangers might, Amandas with an odd twist 
which made them amusing to watch, jolly Amandas 
who were simply irrelevant. There was for example 
Amanda the Dog Mistress, with an astonishing 
tact and understanding of dogs, who could explain 
dogs and the cock of their ears and the droop of their 
tails and their vanity and their fidelity, and why they 
looked up and why they suddenly went off round the 
corner, and their pride in the sound of their voices 
and their dastardly thoughts and sniffing satisfac- 
tions, so that for the first time dogs had souls for 
Benham to see. And there was an Amanda with a 
striking passion for the sleekness and soft noses of 
horses. And there was an Amanda extremely 


254 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


garrulous, who was a biographical dictionary and 
critical handbook to all the girls in the school she 
had attended at Chichester — they seemed a very 
girlish lot of girls ; and an Amanda who was very 
knowing — knowing was the only word for it — 
about pictures and architecture. And these and all 
the other Amandas agreed together to develop and 
share this one quality in common, that altogether 
they pointed to no end, they converged on nothing. 
She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscel- 
lany bound in a body. She was an animated dis- 
cursiveness. That passion to get all things together 
into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of purpose, 
that imperative to focus, which was the structural 
essential of BenhanTs spirit, was altogether foreign 
to her composition. 

There were so many Amandas, they were as 
innumerable as the Venuses — Cytherea, Cypria, 
Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area, Verticordia, Etaira, 
Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte, Philom- 
medis, Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand 
others to whom men have bowed and built temples, a 
thousand and the same, and yet it seemed to Benham 
there was still one wanting. 

The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was 
that Amanda in armour who had walked with him 
through the wilderness of the world along the road to 
Chichester — and that Amanda came back to him 


no more. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


255 


§5 

Amanda too was making her observations and 
discoveries. 

These moods of his perplexed her ; she was 
astonished to find he was becoming irritable; she 
felt that he needed a firm but gentle discipline in his 
deportment as a lover. At first he had been per- 
fect. . . . 

But Amanda was more prepared for human in- 
consecutiveness than Benham, because she herself 
was inconsecutive, and her dissatisfaction with his 
irritations and preoccupation broadened to no general 
discontent. He had seemed perfect and he wasn’t. 
So nothing was perfect. And he had to be managed, 
just as one must manage a dog or a cousin or a mother 
or a horse. Anyhow she had got him, she had no 
doubt that she held him by a thousand ties, the 
spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was 
a prisoner in the dusk of her hair, and the world was 
all one vast promise of entertainment. 

§6 

But the raid into the Balkans was not the tre- 
mendous success she had expected it to be. They 
had adventures, but they were not the richly coloured, 
mediaeval affairs she had anticipated. For the most 
part until Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they 
were adventures in discomfort. In those remote 
parts of Europe inns die away and cease, and it had 
never occurred to Amanda that inns could die away 


256 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


anywhere. She had thought that they just became 
very simple and natural and quaint. And she had 
thought that when benighted people knocked at a 
door it would presently open hospitably. She had 
not expected shots at random from the window. 
And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, 
whether they are Christian or Moslem, to go about 
unveiled ; when they do so it leads to singular mani- 
festations. The moral sense of the men is shocked 
and staggered, and they show it in many homely 
ways. Small boys at that age when feminine beauty 
does not yet prevail with them, pelt. Also in 
Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear 
fezzes, while occasionally Christians of the shawl- 
headed or skull-cap persuasions will pelt a fez. 
Sketching is always a peltable or mobable offence, 
as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down 
tempts the pelter. Generally they pelt. The dogs 
of Albania are numerous, big, dirty, white dogs, 
large and hostile, and they attack with little hesita- 
tion. The women of Albania are secluded and 
remote, and indisposed to be of service to an alien 
sister. Roads are infrequent and most bridges have 
broken down. No bridge has been repaired since 
the later seventeenth century, and no new bridge 
has been made since the decline and fall of the Roman 
Empire. There are no shops at all. The scenery is 
magnificent but precipitous, and many of the high 
roads are difficult to trace. And there is rain. In 
Albania there is sometimes very heavy rain. 

Yet in spite of these drawbacks they spent some 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


257 


splendid hours in their exploration of that wild lost 
country beyond the Adriatic headlands. There was 
the approach to Cattaro for example, through an arm 
of the sea, amazingly beautiful on either shore, that 
wound its way into the wild mountains and ended in 
a deep blue bay under the tremendous declivity of 
Montenegro. The quay, with its trees and lateen 
craft, ran along under the towers and portcullised 
gate of the old Venetian wall, within clustered the 
town, and then the fortifications zigzagged up steeply 
to a monstrous fantastic fortress perched upon a 
great mountain headland that overhung the town. 
Behind it the rocks, slashed to and fro with the road 
to Cettinje, continued to ascend into blue haze, 
upward and upward until they became a purple 
curtain that filled half the heavens. The paved still 
town was squalid by day, but in the evening it 
became theatrically incredible, with an outdoor cafe 
amidst flowers and creepers, a Hungarian military 
band, a rabble of promenaders like a stage chorus in 
gorgeous costumes and a great gibbous yellow moon. 

And there was Kroia, which Benham and Amanda 
saw first through the branches of the great trees that 
bordered the broad green track they were following. 
The town and its castle were poised at a tremendous 
height, sunlit and brilliant against a sombre mass of 
storm cloud, over vast cliffs and ravines. Kroia con- 
tinued to be beautiful through a steep laborious 
approach up to the very place itself, a clustering 
group of houses and bazaars crowned with a tower 
and a minaret, and from a painted corridor upon 
8 


258 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


this crest they had a wonderful view of the great 
seaward levels, and even far away the blue sea itself 
stretching between Scutari and Durazzo. The eye 
fell in succession down the stages of a vast and various 
descent, on the bazaars and tall minarets of the town, 
on jagged rocks and precipices, on slopes of oak 
forest and slopes of olive woods, on blue hills drop- 
ping away beyond blue hills to the coast. And 
behind them when they turned they saw great 
mountains, sullenly magnificent, cleft into vast 
irregular masses, dense with woods below and grim 
and desolate above. . . . 

These were unforgettable scenes, and so too was 
the wild lonely valley through which they rode to 
Ochrida amidst walnut and chestnut trees and 
scattered rocks, and the first vision of that place 
itself, with its fertile levels dotted with sheep and 
cattle, its castle and clustering mosques, its spacious 
blue lake and the great mountains rising up towards 
Olympus under the sun. And there was the first 
view of the blue Lake of Presba seen between silvery 
beech stems, and that too had Olympus in the far 
background, plain now and clear and unexpectedly 
snowy. And there were midday moments when 
they sat and ate under vines and heard voices singing 
very pleasantly, and there were forest glades and 
forest tracks in a great variety of beauty with moun- 
tains appearing through their parted branches, 
there were ilex woods, chestnut woods, beech woods, 
and there were strings of heavily-laden mules stag- 
gering up torrent-worn tracks, and strings of blue- 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


259 


swathed mysterious-eyed women with burthens on 
their heads passing silently, and white remote 
houses and ruins and deep gorges and precipices 
and ancient half-ruinous bridges over unruly streams. 
And if there was rain there was also the ending of 
rain, rainbows, and the piercing of clouds by the sun’s 
incandescence, and sunsets and the moon, first full, 
then new and then growing full again as the holiday 
wore on. 

They found tolerable accommodation at Cattaro 
and at Cettinje and at a place halfway between 
them. It was only when they had secured a guide 
and horses, and pushed on into the south-east of 
Montenegro that they began to realize the real 
difficulties of their journey. They aimed for a 
place called Podgoritza, which had a partially justi- 
fiable reputation for an inn, they missed the road 
and spent the night in the open beside a fire, rolled 
in the blankets they had very fortunately bought 
in Cettinje. They supped on biscuits and Benham’s 
brandy flask. It chanced to be a fine night, and, 
drawn like moths by the fire, four heavily-armed 
mountaineers came out of nowhere, sat down beside 
Benham and Amanda, rolled cigarettes, achieved 
conversation in bad Italian through the muleteer 
and awaited refreshment. They approved of the 
brandy highly, they finished it, and towards dawn 
warmed to song. They did not sing badly, singing 
in chorus, but it appeared to Amanda that the hour 
might have been better chosen. In the morning 
they were agreeably surprised to find one of the 


260 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Englishmen was an Englishwoman, and followed 
every accessible detail of her toilette with great 
interest. They were quite helpful about breakfast 
when the trouble was put to them; two vanished 
over a crest and reappeared with some sour milk, a 
slabby kind of bread, goat’s cheese young but 
hardened, and coffee and the means of making coffee, 
and they joined spiritedly in the ensuing meal. 
It ought to have been extraordinarily good fun, this 
camp under the vast heavens and these wild visitors, 
but it was not such fun as it ought to have been 
because both Amanda and. Benham were extremely 
cold, stiff, sleepy, grubby and cross, and when at 
last they were back in the way to Podgoritza and 
had parted, after some present-giving from their 
chance friends, they halted in a sunlit grassy place, 
rolled themselves up in their blankets and recovered 
their arrears of sleep. 

Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, 
those oriental substitutes for hotels, and it was a 
deceptively good khan, indeed it was not a khan at 
all, it was an inn ; it provided meals, it had a kind 
of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, 
it possessed an upper floor with rooms, separate 
rooms, opening on to a gallery. The room had no 
beds but it had a shelf about it on which Amanda 
and Benham rolled up in their blankets and slept. 
“ We can do this sort of thing all right,” said Amanda 
and Benham. “ But we mustn’t lose the way again.” 

“In Scutari,” said Benham, “we will get an extra 
horse and a tent.” 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


261 


The way presently became a lake and they reached 
Scutari by boat towards the dawn of the next 
day. . . . 

The extra horse involved the addition of its owner, 
a small suspicious Latin Christian, to the company, 
and of another horse for him and an ugly almost 
hairless boy attendant. Moreover the British consul 
prevailed with Benham to accept the services of a 
picturesque Arnaut cavasse, complete with a rifle, 
knives, and other implements and the name of 
Giorgio. And as they got up into the highlands 
beyond Scutari they began to realize the deceitful- 
ness of Podgoritza and the real truth about khans. 
Their next one they reached after a rainy evening, 
and it was a cavernous room with a floor of indurated 
mud and full of eye-stinging wood-smoke and wind 
and the smell of beasts, unpartitioned, with a weakly 
hostile custodian from whom no food could be got 
but a little goat’s flesh and bread. The meat 
Giorgio stuck upon a skewer in gobbets like cats- 
meat and cooked before the fire. For drink there 
was coffee and raw spirits. Against the wall in one 
corner was a slab of wood rather like the draining 
board in a scullery, and on this the guests were 
expected to sleep. The horses and the rest of the 
party camped loosely about the adjacent corner 
after a bitter dispute upon some unknown point 
between the horse owner and the custodian. 

Amanda and Benham were already rolled up on 
their slanting board like a couple of chrysalids when 
other company began to arrive through the open 


262 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


door out of the moonlight, drawn thither by the 
report of a travelling Englishwoman. 

They were sturdy men in light coloured garments 
adorned ostentatiously with weapons, they moved 
mysteriously about in the firelit darknesses and 
conversed in undertones with Giorgio. Giorgio 
seemed to have considerable powers of exposition 
and a gift for social organization. Presently he 
came to Benham and explained that raki was avail- 
able and that hospitality would do no harm; Ben- 
ham and Amanda sat up and various romantic 
figures with splendid moustaches came forward and 
shook hands with him, modestly ignoring Amanda. 
There was drinking, in which Benham shared, incom- 
prehensible compliments, much ineffective saying 
of “ Buona notte,” and at last Amanda and Benham 
counterfeited sleep. This seemed to remove a check 
on the conversation and a heated discussion in tense 
undertones went on, it seemed interminably. . . . 
Probably very few aspects of Benham and Amanda 
were ignored. . . . Towards morning the twanging 
of a string proclaimed the arrival of a querulous- 
faced minstrel with a sort of embryonic one-stringed 
horse-headed fiddle, and after a brief parley singing 
began, a long high-pitched solo. The fiddle squealed 
pitifully under the persuasion of a semicircular bow. 
Two heads were lifted enquiringly. 

The singer had taken up his position at their feet 
and faced them. It was a compliment. 

“Oh!” said Amanda, rolling over. 

The soloist obliged with three songs, and then, just 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


2G3 


as day was breaking, stopped abruptly and sprawled 
suddenly on the floor as if he had been struck asleep. 
He was vocal even in his sleep. A cock in the far 
corner began crowing and was answered by another 
outside. ... 

But this does not give a full account of the anima- 
tion of the khan. “Oh!” said Amanda, rolling over 
again with the suddenness of accumulated anger. 

“They're worse than in Scutari,” said Benham, 
understanding her trouble instantly. 

“It isn’t days and nights we are having,” said 
Benham a few days later, “it’s days and nightmares.” 

But both he and Amanda had one quality in com- 
mon. The deeper their discomfort the less possible it 
was to speak of turning back from the itinerary they 
had planned. . . . 

They met no robbers, though an excited little 
English Levantine in Scutari had assured them they 
would do so and told a vivid story of a ride to Ipek, 
a delay on the road due to a sudden inexplicable 
lameness of his horse after a halt for refreshment, a 
political discussion that delayed him, his hurry 
through the still twilight to make up for lost time, 
the coming on of night and the sudden silent appari- 
tion out of the darkness of the woods about the road 
of a dozen armed men each protruding a gun barrel. 
“Sometimes they will wait for you at a ford or a 
broken bridge,” he said. “In the mountains they 
rob for arms. They assassinate the Turkish soldiers 
even. It is better to go unarmed unless you mean 
to fight for it. . . . Have you got arms?” 


264 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“ Just a revolver,” said Benham. 

But it was after that that he closed with Giorgio. 

If they found no robbers in Albania, they met soon 
enough with bloodshed. They came to a village 
where a friend of a friend of Giorgio’s was discovered, 
and they slept at his house in preference to the 
unclean and crowded khan. Here for the first time 
Amanda made the acquaintance of Albanian women 
and was carried off to the woman’s region at the top 
of the house, permitted to wash, closely examined, 
shown a baby and confided in as generously as 
gesture and some fragments of Italian would permit. 
Benham slept on a rug on the first floor in a corner 
of honour beside the wood fire. There had been 
much confused conversation and some singing, he 
was dog-tired and slept heavily, and when presently 
he was awakened by piercing screams he sat up in a 
darkness that seemed to belong neither to time nor 
place. . . . 

Near his feet was an ashen glow that gave no 
light. 

His first perplexity gave way to dismay at finding 
no Amanda by his side. “ Amanda !” he cried. . . . 

Her voice floated down through a chink in the floor 
above. “What can it be, Cheetah?” 

Then: “It’s coming nearer.” 

The screaming continued, heart-rending, eviscerat- 
ing shrieks. Benham, still confused, lit a match. 
All the men about him were stirring or sitting up 
and listening, their faces showing distorted and ugly 
in the flicker of his light. “Che e?” he tried. No 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


265 


one answered. Then one by one they stood up 
and went softly to the ladder that led to the stable- 
room below. Benham struck a second match and a 
third. 

“ Giorgio !” he called. 

The cavasse made an arresting gesture and follow- 
ed discreetly and noiselessly after the others, leaving 
Benham alone in the dark. 

Benham heard their shuffling patter, one after the 
other, down the ladder, the sounds of a door being 
unbarred softly, and then no other sound but that 
incessant shrieking in the darkness. 

Had they gone out? Were they standing at the 
door looking out into the night and listening? 

Amanda had found the chink and her voice 
sounded nearer. 

“It's a woman/’ she said. 

The shrieking came nearer and nearer, long, re- 
peated, throat-tearing shrieks. Far off there was a 
great clamour of dogs. And there was another 
sound, a whisper — ? 

“Rain!” 

The shrieks s.eemed to turn into a side street and 
receded. The tension .of listening relaxed. Men’s 
voices sounded below in question and answer. Dogs 
close at hand barked shortly and then stopped 
enquiringly. 

Benham seemed to himself to be sitting alone for 
an interminable time. He lit another match and 
consulted his watch. It was four o’clock and nearly 

dawn. . . . 


266 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men 
began to return to Benham’s room. 

“Ask them what it is,” urged Amanda. 

But for a time not even Giorgio would under- 
stand Benham’s questions. There seemed to be a 
doubt whether he ought to know. The shrieking ap- 
proached again and then receded. Giorgio came and 
stood, a vague thoughtful figure, by the embers of the 
fire. Explanation dropped from him reluctantly. It 
was nothing. ' Some one had been killed : that was all. 
It was a vendetta. A man had been missing over- 
night, and this morning his brother who had been 
prowling and searching with some dogs had found 
him, or rather his head. It was on this side of the 
ravine, thrown over from the other bank on which 
the body sprawled stiffly, wet through, and now 
growing visible in the gathering daylight. Yes — 
the voice was the man’s wife. It was raining hard. 
. . . There would be shrieking for nine days. Yes, 
nine days. Confirmation with the fingers when 
Benham still fought against the facts. Her friends 
and relatives would come and shriek too. Two of 
the dead man’s aunts were among the best keeners 
in the whole land. They could keen marvellously. 
It was raining too hard to go on. . . . The road 
would be impossible in rain. ... Yes it was very 
melancholy. Her house was close at hand. Perhaps 
twenty or thirty women would join her. It was 
impossible to go on until it had stopped raining. 
It would be tiresome, but what could one do? . . . 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


267 


§7 

As they sat upon the parapet of a broken bridge on 
the road between Elbassan and Ochrida Benham was 
moved to a dissertation upon the condition of Albania 
and the politics of the Balkan peninsula. 

“Here we are,” he said, “not a week from London, 
and you see the sort of life that men live when the 
forces of civilization fail. We have been close to two 
murders — ” 

“Two?” 

“That little crowd in the square at Scutari — 
That was a murder. I didn’t tell you at the time.” 

“But I knew it was,” said Amanda. 

“And you see the filth of it all, the toiling discom- 
fort of it all. There is scarcely a house here in all the 
land that is not filthier and viler than the worst slum 
in London. No man ventures far from his village 
without arms, everywhere there is fear. The hills 
are impassable because of the shepherd’s dogs. 
Over those hills a little while ago a stranger was 
tom to pieces by dogs — and partially eaten. 
Amanda, these dogs madden me. I shall let fly at 
the beasts. The infernal indignity of it ! But that 
is by the way. You see how all this magnificent 
country lies waste with nothing but this crawling, 
ugly mockery of human life.” 

“They sing,” said Amanda. 

“Yes,” said Benham and reflected, “they do sing. 
I suppose singing is the last thing left to men. When 
there is nothing else you can still sit about and sing. 


268 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Miners who have been buried in mines will sing, 
people going down in ships.” 

“ The Sussex labourers don’t sing,” said Amanda. 
“These people sing well.” 

“They would probably sing as well if they were 
civilized. Even if they didn’t I shouldn’t care. All 
the rest of their lives is muddle and cruelty and 
misery. Look at the women. There was that 
party of bent creatures we met yesterday, carrying 
great bundles, carrying even the men’s cloaks and 
pipes, while their rascal husbands and brothers 
swaggered behind. Look at the cripples we have 
seen and the mutilated men. If we have met one 
man without a nose, we have met a dozen. And 
stunted people. All these people are like evil 
schoolboys ; they do nothing but malicious mischief ; 
there is nothing adult about them but their voices ; 
they are like the heroic dreams of young ruffians in a 
penitentiary. You saw that man at Scutari in the 
corner of the bazaar, the gorgeous brute, you ad- 
mired him — .” 

“The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the 
diamonds on his yataghan. He wanted to show 
them to us.” 

“Yes. You let him see you admired him.” 

“I liked the things on his stall.” 

“Well, he has killed nearly thirty people.” 

“In duels?” 

“Good Lord! No! Assassinations. His shoe- 
maker annoyed him by sending in a bill. He went to 
the man’s stall, found him standing with his child in 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


269 


his arms and blew out his brains. He blundered 
against a passer-by in the road and shot him. Those 
are his feats. Sometimes his pistols go off in the 
bazaar just by accident.” 

“Does nobody kill him?” 

“I wanted to,” said Benham and became thought- 
ful for a time. “I think I ought to have made some 
sort of quarrel. But then as I am an Englishman 
he might have hesitated. He would have funked a 
strange beast like me. And I couldn’t have shot 
him if he had hesitated. And if he hadn’t — ” 

“But doesn’t a blood feud come down on him?” 

“It only comes down on his family. The shoe- 
maker’s son thought the matter over and squared 
accounts by putting the muzzle of a gun into the small 
of the back of our bully’s uncle. It was easier that 
way. . . . You see you’re dealing with men of 
thirteen years old or thereabouts, the boy who doesn’t 
grow up.” 

“But doesn’t the law — ?” 

“There’s no law. Only custom and the Turkish 
tax collector. 

“You see this is what men are where there is no 
power, no discipline, no ruler, no responsibility. 
This is a masterless world. This is pure democracy. 
This is the natural state of men. This is the world 
of the bully and the brigand and assassin, the world 
of the mud-pelter and brawler, the world of the bent 
woman, the world of the flea and the fly, the open 
drain and the baying dog. This is what the British 
sentimentalist thinks a noble state for men.” 


270 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“They fight for freedom.” 

“They fight among each other. There are their 
private feuds and their village feuds and above all 
that great feud religion. In Albania there is only 
one religion and that is hate. But there are three 
churches for the better cultivation of hate and cruelty, 
the Latin, the Greek and the Mahometan.” 

“But no one has ever conquered these people.” 

“Any one could, the Servians, the Bulgarians, the 
Greeks, the Italians, the Austrians. Why, they 
can't even shoot! It's just the balance of power 
and all that foolery keeps this country a roadless 
wilderness. Good God, how I tire of it ! These 
men who swagger and stink, their brawling dogs, 
their greasy priests and dervishes, the down-at-heel 
soldiers, the bribery and robbery, the cheating over 
the money. . . 

He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any 
longer, and began to pace up and down in the road. 

“One marvels that no one comes to clear up this 
country, one itches to be at the job, and then one 
realizes that before one can begin here, one must 
get to work back there, where the fools and pedants 
of Welt Politik scheme mischief one against another. 
This country frets me. I can’t see any fun in it, can’t 
see the humour of it. And the people away there 
know no better than to play off tribe against tribe, 
sect against sect, one peasant prejudice against 
another. Over this pass the foolery grows grimmer 
and viler. We shall come to where the Servian 
plots against the Bulgarian and the Greek against 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


271 


both, and the Turk, with spasmodic massacres and 
indulgences, broods over the brew. Every division 
is subdivided. There are two sorts of Greek church, 
Exarchic, Patriarchic, both teaching by threat and 
massacre. And there is no one, no one, with the 
sense to over-ride all these squalid hostilities. All 
those fools away there in London and Vienna and St. 
Petersburg and Rome take sides as though these 
beastly tribes and leagues and superstitions meant 
anything but blank, black, damnable ignorance. 
One fool stands up for the Catholic Albanians, an- 
other finds heroes in the Servians, another talks of 
Brave Little Montenegro, or the Sturdy Bulgarian, 
or the Heroic Turk. There isn’t a religion in the 
whole Balkan peninsula, there isn’t a tribal or na- 
tional sentiment that deserves a moment’s respect 
from a sane man. They’re things like niggers’ nose- 
rings and Chinese secret societies; childish things, 
idiot things that have to go. Yet there is no one 
who will preach the only possible peace, which is the 
peace of the world-state, the open conspiracy of all 
the sane men in the world against the things that 
break us up into wars and futilities. And here am 
I — who have the light — wandering ! Just wan- 
dering !” 

He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the 
torrent under the bridge. 

“ You’re getting ripe for Condon, Cheetah,” said 
Amanda softly. 

“I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands 
on definite things.” 


272 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“How can we get back?” 

She had to repeat her question presently. 

“We can go on. Over the hills is Ochrida and 
then over another pass is Presba, and from there we 
go down into Monastir and reach a railway and get 
back to the world of our own times again.” 

§8 

But before they reached the world of their own 
times Macedonia was to show them something 
grimmer than Albania. 

They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood 
beyond Ochrida when they came upon the thing. 

The first they saw of it looked like a man lying 
asleep on a grassy bank. But he lay very still indeed, 
he did not look up, he did not stir as they passed, 
the pose of his hand was stiff, and when Benham 
glanced back at him, he stifled a little cry of horror. 
For this man had no face and the flies had been busy 
upon him. ... 

Benham caught Amanda’s bridle so that she had 
to give her attention to her steed. 

“Ahead!” he said, “Ahead! Look, a village!” 

(Why the devil didn’t they bury the man ? Why ? 

And that fool Giorgio and the others were pulling 
up and beginning to chatter. After all she might 
look back.) 

Through the trees now they could see houses. 
He quickened his pace and jerked Amanda’s horse 
forward. . . . 

But the village was a still one. Not a dog barked. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


273 


Here was an incredible village without even a dog ! 

And then, then they saw some more people lying 
about. A woman lay in a doorway. Near her was 
something muddy that might have been a child, 
beyond were six men all spread out very neatly in a 
row with their faces to the sky. 

“ Cheetah!” cried Amanda, with her voice going 
up. “They’ve been killed. Some one has killed 
them.” 

Benham halted beside her and stared stupidly. 

“It’s a band,” he said. “It's — propaganda. 
Greeks or Turks or Bulgarians.” 

“But their feet and hands are fastened ! And — 
. . . What have they been doing to them f . . .” 

“I want to kill,” cried Benham. “Oh! I want 
to kill people. Come on, Amanda ! It blisters 
one’s eyes. Come away. Come away! Come!” 

Her face was white and her eyes terror-stricken. 
She obeyed him mechanically. She gave one last 
look at those bodies. . . . 

Down the deep-rutted soil of the village street they 
clattered. They came to houses that had been set on 
fire. . . . 

“What is that hanging from a tree?” cried 
Amanda. “Oh, oh!” 

“Come on. . . ” 

Behind them rode the others scared and hurrying. 

The sunlight had become the light of hell. There 
was no air but horror. Across Benham’s skies these 
fly-blown trophies of devilry dangled mockingly in 
the place of God. He had no thought but to get away. 


274 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Presently they encountered a detachment of 
Turkish soldiers, very greasy and ragged, with 
worn-out boots and yellow faces, toiling up the stony 
road belatedly to the village. Amanda and Benham 
riding one behind the other in a stricken silence 
passed this labouring column without a gesture, but 
presently they heard the commander stopping and 
questioning Giorgio. . . . 

Then Giorgio and the others came clattering to 
overtake them. 

Giorgio was too full to wait for questions. He 
talked eagerly to Benham’s silence. 

It must have happened yesterday, he explained. 
They were Bulgarians — traitors. They had been 
converted to the Patriarchists by the Greeks — by a 
Greek band, that is to say. They had betrayed 
one of their own people. Now a Bulgarian band had 
descended upon them. Bulgarian bands it seemed 
were always particularly rough on Bulgarian-speak- 
ing Patriarchists. . . . 


§9 

That night they slept in a dirty little room in a 
peasant’s house in Resnia, and in the middle of the 
night Amanda woke up with a start and heard Ben- 
ham talking. He seemed to be sitting up as he 
talked. But he was not talking to her and his voice 
sounded strange. 

“ Flies,” he said, “in the sunlight !” 

He was silent for a time and then he repeated the 
same words. 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


275 


Then suddenly he began to declaim. “Ohf 
Brutes together. Apes. Apes with knives. Have 
they no lord, no master, to save them from such 
things ? This is the life of men when no man rules. 
. . . When no man rules. . . . Not even him- 
self. ... It is because we are idle* because we 
keep our wits slack and our wills weak that these 
poor devils live in hell. These things happen here 
and everywhere when the hand that rules grows 
weak. Away in China now they are happening. 
Persia. Africa. . . . Russia staggers. And I who 
should serve the law, I who should keep order, wan- 
der and make love. . . . My God ! may I never 
forget ! May I never forget ! Flies in the sunlight ! 
That man’s face. And those six men ! 

“Grip the savage by the throat. 

“The weak savage in the foreign office, the weak 
savage at the party headquarters, feud and indolence 
and folly. It is all one w r orld. This and that are all 
one thing. The spites of London and the mutilations 
of Macedonia. The maggots that eat men’s faces 
and the maggots that rot their minds. Rot their 
minds. Rot their minds. Rot their minds. ...” 

To Amanda it sounded like delirium. 

“Cheetah!” she said suddenly between remon- 
strance and a cry of terror. 

The darkness suddenly became quite still. He 
did not move. 

She was afraid. “Cheetah !” she said again. 

“What is it, Amanda?” 

“ I thought — . Are you all right ? ” 


276 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“Quite.” 

“But do you feel well?” 

“I’ve got this cold I caught in Ochrida. I suppose 
I’m feverish. But — yes, I’m well.” 

“You were talking.” 

Silence for a time. 

“I was thinking,” he said. 

“You talked.” 

“I’m sorry,” he said after another long pause. 

§ 10 

The next morning Benham had a pink spot on 
either cheek, his eyes were feverishly bright, he would 
touch no food and instead of coffee he wanted water. 
“In Monastir there will be a doctor,” he said. 
“Monastir is a big place. In Monastir I will see a 
doctor. I want a doctor.” 

They rode out of the village in the freshness before 
sunrise and up long hills, and sometimes they went in 
the shade of woods and sometimes in a flooding sun- 
shine. Benham now rode in front, preoccupied, 
intent, regardless of Amanda, a stranger, and she 
rode close behind him wondering. 

“When you get to Monastir, young man,” she 
told him, inaudibly, “you will go straight to bed 
and we’ll see what has to be done with you.” 

“ Ammalato” said Giorgio confidentially, coming 
abreast of her. 

“ Medico in Monastir ,” said Amanda. 

“Si, — molti medici , Monastir ,” Giorgio agreed. 

Then came the inevitable dogs, big white brutes, 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


277 


three in full cry charging hard at Benham and a 
younger less enterprising beast running along the high 
bank above yapping and making feints to descend. 

The goatherd, reclining under the shadow of a rock, 
awaited Benham’s embarrassment with an indolent 
malice. 

“You uncivilized Beasts!” cried Benham, and 
before Amanda could realize what he was up to, she 
heard the crack of his revolver and saw a puff of blue 
smoke drift away above his right shoulder. The fore- 
most beast rolled over and the goatherd had sprung 
to his feet. He shouted with something between 
anger and dismay as Benham, regardless of the fact 
that the other dogs had turned and were running 
back, let fly a second time. Then the goatherd 
had clutched at the gun that lay on the grass near at 
hand, Giorgio was bawling in noisy remonstrance and 
also getting ready to shoot, and the horse-owner and 
his boy were clattering back to a position of neutral- 
ity up the stony road. “ Bang ! ” came a flight of lead 
within a yard of Benham, and then the goatherd 
was in retreat behind a rock and Giorgio was shout- 
ing “ Avantij Avanti /” to Amanda. 

She grasped his intention and in another moment 
she had Benham’s horse by the bridle and was leading 
the retreat. Giorgio followed close, driving the two 
baggage mules before him. 

“I am tired of dogs,” Benham said. “Tired to 
death of dogs. All savage dogs must be shot. All 
through the world. I am tired — ” 

Their road carried them down through the rocky 


278 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


pass and then up a long slope in the open. Far 
away on the left they saw the goatherd running and 
shouting and other armed goatherds appearing 
among the rocks. Behind them the horse-owner and 
his boy came riding headlong across the zone of 
danger. 

“Dogs must be shot,” said Benham, exalted. 
“Dogs must be shot.” 

“Unless they are good dogs,” said Amanda, keep- 
ing beside him with an eye on his revolver. 

“Unless they are good dogs to every one,” said 
Benham. 

They rushed along the road in a turbulent dusty 
huddle of horses and mules and riders. The horse- 
owner, voluble in Albanian, was trying to get past 
them. His boy pressed behind him. Giorgio in 
the rear had unslung his rifle and got it across the 
front of his saddle. Far away they heard the sound 
of a shot, and a kind of shudder in the air overhead 
witnessed to the flight of the bullet. They crested a 
rise and suddenly between the tree boughs Monastir 
was in view, a wide stretch of white town, with many 
cypress and plane trees, a winding river with many 
wooden bridges, clustering minarets of pink and 
white, a hilly cemetery, and scattered patches of 
soldiers’ tents like some queer white crop to supple- 
ment its extensive barracks. 

As they hurried down towards this city of refuge a 
long string of mules burthened with great bales of 
green stuff appeared upon a convergent track to the 
left. Besides the customary muleteers there were, 


THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON 


279 


by way of an escort, a couple of tattered Turkish 
soldiers. All these men watched the headlong 
approach of Benham’s party with apprehensive 
inquiry. Giorgio shouted some sort of information 
that made the soldiers brighten up and stare up the 
hill, and set the muleteers whacking and shouting 
at their convoy. It struck Amanda that Giorgio 
must be telling lies about a Bulgarian band. In 
another moment Benham and Amanda found them- 
selves swimming in a torrent of mules. Presently 
they overtook a small flock of fortunately nimble 
sheep, and picked up several dogs, dogs that happily 
disregarded Benham in the general confusion. 
They also comprehended a small springless cart, two 
old women with bundles and an elderly Greek priest, 
before their dusty, barking, shouting cavalcade 
reached the outskirts of Monastir. The two soldiers 
had halted behind to cover the retreat. 

Benham’s ghastly face was now bedewed with 
sweat and he swayed in his saddle as he rode. “ This 
is not civilization, Amanda,” he said, “this is not 
civilization.” 

And then suddenly with extraordinary pathos : 
“Oh! I want to go to bed ! I want to go to bed! 
A bed with sheets. . . .” 

To ride into Monastir is to ride into a maze. The 
streets go nowhere in particular. At least that was 
the effect on Amanda and Benham. It was as if 
Monastir too had a temperature and was slightly 
delirious. But at last they found an hotel — quite a 
civilized hotel. . . . 


280 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


The doctor in Monastir was an Armenian with an 
ambition that outran his capacity to speak English. 
He had evidently studied the language chiefly from 
books. He thought these was pronounced “theser” 
and those was pronounced “thoser,” and that every 
English sentence should be taken at a rush. He 
diagnosed Benham’s complaint in various languages 
and failed to make his meaning clear to Amanda. 
One combination of words he clung to obstinately, 
having clearly the utmost faith in its expressiveness. 
To Amanda it sounded like, “May, Ah ! Slays,” and 
it seemed to her that he sought to intimate a probable 
fatal termination of Benham’s fever. But it was 
clear that the doctor was not satisfied that she under- 
stood. He came again with a queer little worn book, 
a parallel vocabulary of half-a-dozen European 
languages. 

He turned over the pages and pointed to a word. 
“May! Ah! Slays!” he repeated, reproachfully, 
almost bitterly. 

“Oh, measles /” cried Amanda. . . . 

So the spirited honeymoon passed its zenith. 

§11 

The Benhams went as soon as possible down to 
Smyrna and thence by way of Uskub tortuously back 
to Italy. They recuperated at the best hotel of 
Locarno in golden November weather, and just before 
Christmas they turned their faces back to England. 

Benham’s plans were comprehensive but entirely 
vague; Amanda had not so much plans as inten- 
tions. . . . 


CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
The Assize of Jealousy 
§1 

It was very manifest in the disorder of papers 
amidst which White spent so many evenings of in- 
terested perplexity before this novel began to be 
written that Benham had never made any systematic 
attempt at editing or revising his accumulation at all. 
There were not only overlapping documents, in 
which he had returned again to old ideas and re- 
stated them in the light of fresh facts and an apparent 
unconsciousness of his earlier effort, but there were 
mutually destructive papers, new views quite ousting 
the old had been tossed in upon the old, and the very 
definition of the second limitation, as it had first 
presented itself to the writer, had been abandoned. 
To begin with, this second division had been labelled 
“Sex,” in places the heading remained, no effective 
substitute had been chosen for some time, but there 
was a closely-written memorandum, very much 
erased and written over and amended, which showed 
Benham’s early dissatisfaction with that crude 
rendering of what he had in mind. This memo- 
randum was tacked to an interrupted fragment of 
autobiography, a manuscript soliloquy in which 
Benham had been discussing his married life. 

281 


282 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“It was not until I had been married for the better 
part of a year, and had spent more than six months in 
London, that I faced the plain issue between the 
aims I had set before myself and the claims and im- 
mediate necessities of my personal life. For all that 
time I struggled not so much to reconcile them as to 
serve them simultaneously. . . ” 

At that the autobiography stopped short, and the 
intercalary note began. 

This intercalary note ran as follows : 

“I suppose a mind of my sort cannot help but tend 
towards simplification, towards making all life turn 
upon some one dominant idea, complex perhaps in its 
reality but reducible at last to one consistent simple 
statement, a dominant idea which is essential as 
nothing else is essential, which makes and sustains 
and justifies. This is perhaps the innate disposition 
of the human mind, at least of the European mind — 
for I have some doubts about the Chinese. The- 
ology drives obstinately towards an ultimate unity 
in God, science towards an ultimate unity in law, 
towards a fundamental element and a universal 
material truth from which all material truths evolve, 
and in matters of conduct there is the same tendency 
to refer to a universal moral law. Now this may be 
a simplification due to the need of the human mind 
to comprehend, and its inability to do so until the 
load is lightened by neglecting factors. William 
James has suggested that on account of this, theology 
may be obstinately working away from the truth, that 
the truth may be that there are several or many in- 


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283 


compatible and incommensurable gods ; science, 
in the same search for unity, may follow divergent 
methods of inquiry into ultimately uninterchange- 
able generalizations ; and there may be not only not 
one universal moral law, but no effective recon- 
ciliation of the various rights and duties of a single 
individual. At any rate I find myself doubtful to 
this day about my own personal systems of right and 
wrong. I can never get all my life into one focus. 
It is exactly like examining a rather thick section 
with a microscope of small penetration; sometimes 
one level is clear and the rest foggy and monstrous, 
and sometimes another. 

“ Now the ruling me, I do not doubt, is the man who 
has set his face to this research after aristocracy, and 
from the standpoint of this research it is my duty to 
subordinate all other considerations to this work of 
clearing up the conception of rule and nobility in 
human affairs. This is my aristocratic self. What I 
did not grasp for a long time, and which now grows 
clearer and clearer to me, is firstly that this aristo- 
cratic self is not the whole of me, it has absolutely 
nothing to do with a pain in my ear or in my heart, 
with a scar on my hand or my memory, and secondly 
that it is not altogether mine. Whatever knowledge 
I have of the quality of science, whatever will I 
have towards right, is of it ; but if from without, 
from the reasoning or demonstration or reproof of 
some one else, there comes to me clear knowledge, 
clarified will, that also is as it were a part of my aris- 
tocratic self coming home to me from the outside. 


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How often have I not found my own mind in Prothero 
after I have failed to find it in myself ? It is, to be 
paradoxical, my impersonal personality, this Being 
that I have in common with all scientific-spirited 
and aristocratic-spirited men. This it is that I am 
trying to get clear from the great limitations of 
humanity. When I assert a truth for the sake of 
truth to my own discomfort or injury, there again 
is this incompatibility of the aristocratic self and 
the accepted, confused, conglomerate self of the 
unanalyzed man. The two have a separate system 
of obligations. One’s affections, compounded as 
they are in the strangest way of physical reactions 
and emotional associations, one’s implicit pledges 
to particular people, one’s involuntary reactions, 
one’s pride and jealousy, all that one might call 
the dramatic side of one’s life, may be in conflict 
with the definitely seen rightnesses of one’s higher 
use. . . .” 

The writing changed at this point. 

“All this seems to me at once as old as the hills 
and too new to be true. This is like the conflict 
of the Superior Man of Confucius to control him- 
self, it is like the Christian battle of the spirit with 
the flesh, it savours of that eternal wrangle between 
the general and the particular which is metaphysics, 
it was for this aristocratic self, for righteousness’ 
sake, that men have hungered and thirsted, and 
on this point men have left father and mother and 
child and wife and followed after salvation. This 
world-wide, ever-returning antagonism has filled 


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285 


the world in every age with hermits and lamas, 
recluses and teachers, devoted and segregated lives. 
It is a perpetual effort to get above the simplicity 
of barbarism. Whenever men have emerged from 
the primitive barbarism of the farm and the tribe, 
then straightway there has emerged this conception 
of a specialized life a little lifted off the earth ; 
often, for the sake of freedom, celibate, usually 
disciplined, sometimes directed, having a gener- 
alized aim, beyond personal successes and bodily 
desires. So it is that the philosopher, the scien- 
tifically concentrated man, has appeared, often, I 
admit, quite ridiculously at first, setting out upon 
the long journey that will end only when the philoso- 
pher is king. . . . 

“At first I called my Second Limitation, Sex. 
But from the outset I meant more than mere sexual 
desire, lust and lustful imaginings, more than per- 
sonal reactions to beauty and spirited living, more 
even than what is called love. On the one hand I 
had in mind many appetites that are not sexual yet 
turn to bodily pleasure, and on the other there are 
elements of pride arising out of sex and passing into 
other regions, all the elements of rivalry for example, 
that have strained my first definition to the utmost. 
And I see now that this Second Limitation as I 
first imagined it spreads out without any definite 
boundary, to include one’s rivalries with old school- 
fellows, for example, one’s generosities to beggars 
and dependents, one’s desire to avenge an injured 
friend, one’s point of honour, one’s regard for the 


286 


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good opinion of an aunt and one’s concern for the 
health of a pet cat. All these things may enrich, 
but they may also impede and limit the aristocratic 
scheme. I thought for a time I would call this 
ill-defined and miscellaneous wilderness of limitation 
the Personal Life. But at last I have decided to 
divide this vast territory of difficulties into two 
subdivisions and make one of these Indulgence, 
meaning thereby pleasurable indulgence of sense or 
feeling, and the other a great mass of self-regarding 
motives that will go with a little stretching under 
the heading of Jealousy. I admit motives are 
continually playing across the boundary of these 
two divisions, I should find it difficult to argue a 
case for my classification, but in practice these two 
groupings have a quite definite meaning for me. 
There is pride in the latter group of impulses and 
not in the former; the former are always a little 
apologetic. Fear, Indulgence, Jealousy, these are 
the First Three Limitations of the soul of man. 
And the greatest of these is Jealousy, because it 
can use pride. Over them the Life Aristocratic, 
as I conceive it, marches to its end. It saves itself 
for the truth rather than sacrifices itself romanti- 
cally for a friend. It justifies vivisection if thereby 
knowledge is won for ever. It upholds that Brutus 
who killed his sons. It forbids devotion to women, 
courts of love and all such decay of the chivalrous 
idea. And it resigns — so many things that no 
common Man of Spirit will resign. Its intention 
transcends these things. Over all the world it 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


287 


would maintain justice, order, a noble peace, and 
it would do this without indignation, without resent- 
ment, without mawkish tenderness or individualized 
enthusiasm or any queen of beauty. It is of a cold 
austere quality, commanding sometimes admiration 
but having small hold upon the affections of men. 
So that it is among its foremost distinctions that its 
heart is steeled. . . .” 

There this odd fragment ended and White was 
left to resume the interrupted autobiography. 

§2 

What moods, what passions, what nights of despair 
and gathering storms of anger, what sudden cruelties 
and amazing tendernesses are buried and hidden and 
implied in every love story ! What a waste is there 
of exquisite things ! So each spring sees a million 
glorious beginnings, a sunlit heaven in every opening 
leaf, warm perfection in every stirring egg, hope 
and fear and beauty beyond computation in every 
forest tree ; and in the autumn before the snows 
come they have all gone, of all that incalculable 
abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, 
excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more 
to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead 
leaf, black mould or a rotting feather. . . . 

Wdiite held the ten or twelve pencilled pages 
that told how Benham and Amanda drifted into 
antagonism and estrangement and as he held it 
he thought of the laughter and delight they must 
have had together, the exquisite excitements of 


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her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the gleams 
of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between 
them, the sense of discovery, the high rare paths 
they had followed, the pools in which they had 
swum together. And now it was all gone into 
nothingness, there was nothing left of it, nothing 
at all, but just those sheets of statement, and it 
may be, stored away in one single mind, like things 
forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memo- 
ries. . . . 

And even those few sheets of statement were 
more than most love leaves behind it. For a time 
White would not read them. They lay neglected 
on his knee as he sat back in Benham’s most com- 
fortable chair and enjoyed an entirely beautiful 
melancholy. 

White too had seen and mourned the spring. 

Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned 
several springs. . . . 

With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read 
Benham’s desiccated story of intellectual estrange- 
ment, and how in the end he had decided to leave 
his wife and go out alone upon that journey of 
inquiry he had been planning when first he met 
her. 


§3 

Amanda had come back to England in a state of 
extravagantly vigorous womanhood. Benham’s ill- 
ness, though it lasted only two or three weeks, 
gave her a sense of power and leadership for which 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


289 


she had been struggling instinctively ever since 
they came together. For a time at Locarno he was 
lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed 
her bright and limited plans for London. Benham 
had no plans as yet but only a sense of divergence, 
as though he was being pulled in opposite directions 
by two irresistible forces. To her it was plain 
that he needed occupation, some distinguished 
occupation, and she could imagine nothing better 
for him than a political career. She perceived he 
had personality, that he stood out among men so 
that his very silences were effective. She loved 
him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions 
for him and through him. 

And also London, the very thought of London, 
filled her with appetite. Her soul thirsted for 
London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit 
waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost 
large enough to give her avidity the sense of enough. 
She felt it waiting for her, household, servants, a 
carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and 
possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture 
exhibitions, great dinner-parties, brilliant lunch 
parties, crowds seen from a point of vantage, the 
carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the 
lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand 
bright settings, in a thousand various dresses. 
She had had love ; it had been glorious, it was still 
glorious, but her love-making became now at times 
almost perfunctory in the contemplation of these 
approaching delights and splendours and excitements. 


290 


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She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in 
BenhanTs head ; but she was a realist. She did not 
see why ideas should stand in the way of a career. 
Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. 
One talks ideas, but the thing that is, is the thing 
that is. And though she believed that Benham had 
a certain strength of character of his own, she had 
that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the 
power of her endearments that has in it the assur- 
ance of a faint contempt. She had mingled pride 
and sense in the glorious realization of the power 
over him that her wit and beauty gave her. She 
had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated 
with the pride of her complete possession, and she 
did not dream that the moment when he should 
see clearly that she could deliberately use these 
ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would 
be the end of their splendour and her power. Her 
nature, which was just a nest of vigorous appetites, 
was incapable of suspecting his gathering disillusion- 
ment until it burst upon her. 

Now with her attention set upon London ahead 
he could observe her. In the beginning he had 
never seemed to be observing her at all, they dazzled 
one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him 
to note how much he had been able to disregard. 
There were countless times still when he would 
have dropped his observation and resumed that 
mutual exaltation very gladly, but always now 
other things possessed her mind. . . . 

There was still an immense pleasure for him in 


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291 


her vigour; there was something delightful in her 
pounce, even when she was pouncing on things 
superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him 
understand and share the excitement of a big night 
at the opera, the glitter and prettiness of a smart 
restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures 
of a great reception of gay people, just as she had 
already made him understand and sympathize 
with dogs. She picked up the art world where 
he had laid it down, and she forced him to feel 
dense and slow before he rebelled against her multi- 
tudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Kart- 
ing had had its little group of artistic people ; it 
is not one of your sleepy villages, and she slipped 
back at once into the movement. Those were the 
great days of John, the days before the Post Im- 
pressionist outbreak. John, Orpen, Tonks, she 
bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began 
to revolve about her. Very rapidly she was in 
possession. . . . And among other desirable things 
she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured 
Lady Marayne. 

At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile 
silence and aloofness was to end. Benham never 
quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda 
had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, 
very sweetly and chastely dressed, had abased her- 
self and announced a possible (though subsequently 
disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated 
the little lady so highly and openly, she had so 
instantly caught and reproduced her tone, that 


292 


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her success, though only temporary in its complete- 
ness, was immediate. In the afternoon Benham 
was amazed by the apparition of his mother amidst 
the scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home 
Amanda had chosen in Lancaster Gate. He was 
in the hall, the door stood open awaiting packing- 
cases from a van without. In the open doorway 
she shone, looking the smallest of dainty things. 
There was no effect of her coming but only of her 
having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly will 
suddenly alight on a flower. 

“Well, Poff!” said Lady Marayne, ignoring 
abysses, “What are you up to now, Poff? Come 
and embrace me. . . .” 

“No, not so,” she said, “ stiff est of sons. . . 

She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and 
kissed one eye. 

“Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh ! congratu- 
lations ! In heaps. I’m so glad” 

Now what was that for? 

And then Amanda came out upon the landing 
upstairs, saw the encounter with an involuntary cry 
of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open. 
It was the first intimation he had of their previous 
meeting. He was for some minutes a stunned, 
entirely inadequate Benham. . . . 

§4 

At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a 
few people in the Hampstead Garden suburb that 
she had not the slightest wish to know, and then 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


293 


very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of peo- 
ple. The artistic circle brought in people, Lady 
Marayne brought in people ; they spread. It 
was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young 
couple ; he would certainly do something consider- 
able presently, and she was bright and daring, jolly 
to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came 
to talk to her, astonishingly well informed. They 
passed from one hostess’s hand to another : they 
reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rush- 
tones took her up ; Mr. Evesham was amused 
by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her 
charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people 
made jealous advances, Lord Moggeridge found 
she listened well, she lit one of the brightest week- 
end parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at 
Chexington. And her descriptions of recent danger 
and adventure in Albania not only entertained 
her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal 
courage which completes the fascination of a young 
woman. People in the gaps of a halting dinner- 
table conversation would ask: “Have you met 
Mrs. Benham?” 

Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A 
smiling and successful young woman, who a year 
ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a 
good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and 
vaguely engaged, or at least friendly to the pitch 
of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, may be 
forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does 
not altogether grasp the intention of her husband’s 


294 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


discourse. It seemed to her that he was obsessed 
by a responsibility for civilization and the idea 
that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined 
to doubt whether he was justified in calling himself 
aristocratic ; at the best his mother was county- 
stuff ; but still if he did there was no great harm 
in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democ- 
racy, social reform through the House of Lords 
and friendly intimacy with the more spirited young 
peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly 
that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory 
solution of his problem. She reproduced all the 
equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street 
study in their new home, she declared constantly 
that she would rather forego any old social thing 
than interfere with his work, she never made him 
go anywhere with her without first asking if his 
work permitted it. To relieve him of the burthen 
of such social attentions she even made a fag or so. 
The making of fags out of manifestly stricken 
men, the keeping of tamed and hopeless admirers, 
seemed to her to be the most natural and reason- 
able of feminine privileges. They did their use- 
ful little services until it pleased the Lord Cheetah 
to come to his own. That was how she put it. . . . 

But at last he was talking to her in tones that 
could no longer be ignored. He was manifestly 
losing his temper with her. There was a novel 
austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness 
about his face on certain occasions that lingered in 
her memory. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


295 


He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He 
said that what he wanted to do was to understand 
“the collective life of the world,” and that this 
was not to be done in a West-End study. He 
had an extraordinary contempt, it seemed, for 
both sides in the drama of British politics. He had 
extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more 
fundamental way. He wanted to understand this 
“collective life of the world,” because ultimately 
he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such 
nonsense?) The practical side of this was serious 
enough, however ; he was back at his old idea of 
going round the earth. Later on that might be 
rather a jolly thing to do, but not until they had 
struck root a little more surely in London. 

And then with amazement, with incredulity, with 
indignation, she began to realize that he was pro- 
posing to go off by himself upon this vague extrav- 
agant research, that all this work she had been 
doing to make a social place for him in London 
was as nothing to him, that he was thinking of him- 
self as separable from her. . . . 

“But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spot- 
less leopard ? You would howl in the lonely jungle ! ” 

“Possibly I shall. But I am going.” 

“Then I shall come.” 

“No.” He considered her reasons. “You see 
you are not interested.” 

“But I am.” 

“Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly 
holiday. You don’t want to see things as I want to 


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do. You want romance. All the world is a show 
for you. As a show I can’t endure it. I want to 
lay hands on it.” 

“But, Cheetah!” she said, “this is separation.” 

“You will have your life here. And I shall come 
back.” 

“But, Cheetah ! How can we be separated?” 

“We are separated,” he said. 

Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then 
her face puckered. 

“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, 
“I love you. What do you mean?” 

And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt 
for his neck and shoulders, so that she might weep in 
his arms. . . . 

§5 

“Don’t say we are separated,” she whispered, 
putting her still wet face close to his. 

“No. We’re mates,” he answered softly, with 
his arm about her. 

“How could we ever keep away from each uwer ? ” 
she whispered. 

He was silent. 

“How could we?” 

He answered aloud. “Amanda,” he said, “I 
mean to go round the world.” 

She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up 
beside him. 

“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly 
in a voice of despair, “while you go round the 


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297 


world? If you desert me in London,” she said, 
“if you shame me by deserting me in London — 
If you leave me, I will never forgive you, Cheetah ! 
Never.” Then in an almost breathless voice, and 
as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.” 

§6 

It was after that that Amanda began to talk 
about children. There was nothing involuntary 
about Amanda. “Soon,” she said, “we must begin 
to think of children. Not just now, but a little 
later. It’s good to travel and have our fun, but 
life is unreal until there are children in the back- 
ground. No woman is really content until she is a 
mother. ...” And for nearly a fortnight nothing 
more was said about that solitary journey round 
the world. 

But children were not the only new topic in 
Amanda’s talk. She set herself with an ingenious 
subtlety to remind her husband that there were 
other men in the world. The convenient fags, 
sometimes a little embarrassed, found their inobtru- 
sive services being brought into the light before 
Benham’s eyes. Most of them were much older 
men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it 
seemed to him no sane man need be jealous, men 
often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, 
Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish 
blood and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite 
manifestly was very much in love with Amanda 
and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible 


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difference of manner that made Benham faintly 
uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton 
it seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so 
that Amanda could trust herself with him to an 
extent that would have been inadvisable with 
men of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of 
understanding and sympathy that was almost 
feminine; he could cheer one up when one was 
lonely and despondent. For Amanda was so method- 
ical in the arrangement of her time that even in the 
full rush of a London season she could find an hour 
now and then for being lonely and despondent. 
And he was a liberal and understanding purchaser of 
the ascendant painters ; he understood that side of 
Amanda’s interests, a side upon which Benham was 
notably deficient. . . . 

“ Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff ; what 
is his name? — Sir Philip Easton?” said Lady 
Marayne. 

Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile 
intelligence, and said nothing. 

“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” 
said Lady Marayne. 

“No,” said Benham after consideration. “I 
don’t intend to be a wife-herd.” 

“What?” 

“Wife-herd — same as goat-herd.” 

“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff — nowadays.” 

“It’s exactly what I mean. I can understand the 
kind of curator’s interest an Oriental finds in shep- 
herding a large establishment, but to spend my days 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


290 


looking after one person who ought to be able to 
look after herself — ” 

“She’s very young.” 

“She’s quite grown up. Anyhow I’m not a moral 
nursemaid.” 

“If you leave her about and go abroad — ” 

“Has she been talking to you, mother?” 

“The thing shows.” 

“But about my going abroad?” 

“She said something, my little Poff.” 

Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath 
Benham’s indifference was something strung very 
tight, as though he had been thinking inordinately. 
He weighed his words before he spoke again. “If 
Amanda chooses to threaten me with a sort of con- 
ditional infidelity, I don’t see that it ought to change 
the plans I have made for my life. ...” 

§7 

“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” 
Benham wrote. “If he chances to be mated with a 
woman who does not see his vision or naturally go 
his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to 
compel her to go his way. What is the use of drag- 
ging an unwilling companion through morasses of 
uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is 
the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who 
has no inherent will to seek and live the aristocratic 
life? 

“But that does not excuse him from obedience to 
his own call. ...” 


300 


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He wrote that very early in his examination of the 
Third Limitation. Already he had thought out and 
judged Amanda. The very charm of her, the sweet- 
ness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him 
more grimly resolute to break away. All the elab- 
orate process of thinking her over had gone on 
behind the mask of his silences while she had been 
preoccupied with her housing and establishment in 
London; it was with a sense of extraordinary in- 
justice, of having had a march stolen upon her, of 
being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself 
faced by foregone conclusions. He was ready now 
even with the details of his project. She should go 
on with her life in London exactly as she had planned 
it. He would take fifteen hundred a year for himself 
and all the rest she might spend without check or 
stint as it pleased her. He was going round the 
world for one or two years. It was even possible 
he would not go alone. There was a man at Cam- 
bridge he might persuade to come with him, a don 
called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping 
him to hammer out his ideas. . . . 

To her it became commandingly necessary that 
none of these things should happen. 

She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick 
instinct speedily told her that this only hardened his 
heart. She perceived that she must make a softer 
appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive 
and imitate the spontaneous passion of the honey- 
moon ; she perceived for the first time clearly how 
wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to bear 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


301 


a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a 
child/ ’ she told herself. But that would mean 
illness, and for illness in herself or others Amanda 
had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet 
even illness would be better than this intolerable 
publication of her husband’s ability to leave her 
side. . . . 

She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she 
set herself forthwith to cultivate a philoprogenitive 
ambition, to communicate it to him. Her dread of 
illness disappeared ; her desire for offspring grew. 

“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I 
must go round the world none the less.” 

She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of 
her fine keen mind. She argued with persistence 
and repetition. And then suddenly so that she was 
astonished at herself, there came a moment when 
she ceased to argue. 

She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out 
upon the park, and she was now so intent upon her 
purpose as to be still and self-forgetful ; she was 
dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, 
that set off her slim erect body and the strong clear 
lines of her neck and shoulders very beautifully, 
some greenish stones caught a light from without 
and flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the 
misty darkness of her hair. She was going to Lady 
Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a 
dinner at the House with some young Liberals at 
which he was to meet two representative Indians 
with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and wife 


302 


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had but a few moments together. She asked about 
his company and he told her. 

“They will tell you about India.” 

“Yes.” 

She stood for a moment looking out across the 
lights and the dark green trees, and then she turned 
to him. 

“Why cannot I come with you?” she asked with 
sudden passion. “Why cannot I see the things you 
want to see?” 

“I tell you you are not interested. You would 
only be interested through me. That would not 
help me. I should just be dealing out my premature 
ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted 
to know as I want to know, it would be different. 
But you don’t. It isn’t your fault that you don’t. 
It happens so. And there is no good in forced 
interest, in prescribed discovery.” 

“Cheetah,” she asked, “what is it that you want 
to know — that I don’t care for?” 

“I want to know about the world. I want to 
rule the world.” 

“So do I.” 

“No, you want to have the world.” 

“Isn’t it the same?” 

“No. You’re a greedier thing than I am, you 
Black Leopard you — standing there in the dusk. 
You’re a stronger thing. Don’t you know you’re 
stronger? When I am with you, you carry your 
point, because you are more concentrated, more 
definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


303 


you push me out of my path. . . . You’ve made 
me afraid of you. . . . And so I won’t go with you, 
Leopard. I go alone. It isn’t because I don’t 
love you. I love you too well. It isn’t because you 
aren’t beautiful and wonderful. ...” 

“But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for 
this that you want than you care for me.” 

Benham thought of it. “I suppose I do,” he 
said. 

“What is it that you want? Still I don’t under- 
stand.” 

Her voice had the break of one who would keep 
reasonable in spite of pain. 

“I ought to tell you.” 

“Yes, you ought to tell me.” 

“I wonder if I can tell you,” he said very thought- 
fully, and rested his hands on his hips. “I shall 
seem ridiculous to you.” 

“You ought to tell me.” 

“I think what I want is to be king of the world.” 

She stood quite still staring at him. 

“ I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, 
do you remember those bodies — you saw those 
bodies — those mutilated men?” 

“I saw them,” said Amanda. 

“Well. Is it nothing to you that those things 
happen?” 

“They must happen.” 

“No. They happen because there are no kings 
but pitiful kings. They happen because the kings 
love their Amandas and do not care.” 


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“But what can you do, Cheetah ?” 

“Very little. But I can give my life and all my 
strength. I can give all I can give.” 

“But how? How can you help it — help things 
like that massacre?” 

“I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong 
with my world and rule it and set it right.” 

11 You! Alone.” 

“Other men do as much. Every one who does so 
helps others to do so. You see — ... In this 
world one may wake in the night and one may 
resolve to be a king, and directly one has resolved 
one is a king. Does that sound foolishness to you? 
Anyhow, it’s fair that I should tell you, though 
you count me a fool. This — this kingship — this 
dream of the night — is my life. It is the very core 
of me. Much more than you are. More than 
anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this 
earth. King. I’m not mad. ... I see the world 
staggering from misery to misery and there is little 
wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the 
good things come by chance and the evil things 
recover and slay them, and it is my world and I am 
responsible. Every man to whom this light has come 
is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, 
as soon as your kingship is plain to you, there is no 
more rest, no peace, no delight, except in work, in 
service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I 
will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug 
city, I cannot endure its self-complacency, its routine, 
its gloss of success, its rottenness. ... I shall do 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


305 


little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I can 
understand and what I can do I will do. Think of 
that wild beautiful country we saw, and the mean 
misery, the filth and the warring cruelty of the life 
that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; 
and think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of 
Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and 
China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily 
to disaster. Do you think these are only things in 
the newspapers? To me at any rate they are not 
things in newspapers; they are pain and failure, 
they are torment, they are blood and dust and misery. 
They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly 
absurd I will still do my utmost. It is absurd. 
I’m a madman and you and my mother are sensible 
people. . . . And I will go my way. ... I don’t 
care for the absurdity. I don’t care a rap.” 

He stopped abruptly. 

“ There you have it, Amanda. It’s rant, per- 
haps. Sometimes I feel it’s rant. And yet it’s the 
breath of life to me. . . . There you are. . . . 
At last I’ve been able to break silence and tell 
you. ...” 

He stopped with something like a sob and stood 
regarding the dusky mystery of her face. She stood 
quite still, she was just a beautiful outline in the 
twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the 
black shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two 
patches of darkness. 

He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face 
to see the time. His voice changed. “Well — if 


306 


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you provoke a man enough, you see he makes 
speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. 
Here we are talking instead of going to our dinners. 
The car has been waiting ten minutes.” 

Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of 
all Amandas. . . . 

A strange exaltation seized upon her very sud- 
denly. In an instant she had ceased to plot against 
him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward 
to a resolution that astonished her. 

“ Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of 
her voice had changed, “give me one thing. Stay 
until June with me.” 

“Why?” he asked. 

Her answer came in a voice so low that it was 
almost a whisper. 

“Because — now — no, I don’t want to keep you 
any more — I am not trying to hold you any more. 
... I want. ...” 

She came forward to him and looked up closely at 
his face. 

“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, 
“Cheetah — I didn’t understand. But now — . I 
want to bear your child.” 

He was astonished. “Old Leopard!” he said. 

“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his 
shoulders and drawing very close to him, “Queen — 
if I can be — to your King.” 

“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, 
profoundly moved. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


307 


§8 

The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner 
under the House of Commons came to the conclusion 
that Benham was a dreamer. And over against 
Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, 
one of those men who know that their judgments 
are quoted. 

“ Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing 
visions?” he asked of his neighbour in confidential 
undertones. ... 

He tittered. “I think, you know, she ought to 
seem just slightly aware that the man to her left is 
talking to her. . . 


A few days later Benham went down to Cam- 
bridge, where Prothero was now a fellow of Trinity 
and Brissenden Trust Lecturer. . . . 

All through Benham’s writing there was manifest 
a persuasion that in some way Prothero was neces- 
sary to his mind. It was as if he looked to Prothero 
to keep him real. He suspected even while he 
obeyed that upward flourish which was his own essen- 
tial characteristic. He had a peculiar feeling that 
somehow that upward bias would betray him ; that 
from exaltation he might presently float off, into the 
higher, the better, and so to complete unreality. 
He fled from priggishness and the terror of such 
sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation 
to so many things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive 


308 


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manner saw. He had less self-control than Ben- 
ham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration, 
and things that were before his eyes were by the very 
virtue of these defects invariably visible to him. 
Things were able to insist upon themselves with him. 
Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted 
his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind 
to them. He repudiated inconvenient facts. He 
mastered and made his world; Prothero accepted 
and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the 
universe where Prothero was a perception and 
Amanda a confusing responsive activity. And it 
was because of his realization of this profound dif- 
ference between them that he was possessed by the 
idea of taking Prothero with him about the world, 
as a detachable kind of vision — rather like that 
eye the Graiae used to hand one another. . . . 

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cam- 
bridge, Prothero’s rooms in Trinity, their windows 
full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue sky, 
seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship 
pervaded them — a little blended with the flavour 
of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not completely 
forgotten. Prothero’s door had been locked against 
the world, and he had appeared after a slight delay 
looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his 
visitor was after a resentful stare for the better part 
of a second. He might have been asleep, he might 
have been doing anything but the examination 
papers he appeared to be doing. The two men ex- 
changed personal details; they had not met since 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


309 


some months before Benham’s marriage, and the 
visitor’s eye went meanwhile from his host to the 
room and back to his host’s face as though they were 
all aspects of the thing he was after, the Prothero 
humour, the earthly touch, the distinctive Prothero 
flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red, 
incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the 
couch that had an air of having been flung aside, 
Venus in Gem and Marble, its cover proclaimed. . . . 

His host followed that glance and blushed. “ They 
send me all sorts of inappropriate stuff to review,” 
he remarked. 

And then he was denouncing celibacy. 

The transition wasn’t very clear to Benham. His 
mind had been preoccupied by the problem of how 
to open his own large project. Meanwhile Prothero 
got, as it were, the conversational bit between his 
teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shock- 
ing things right away, so that Benham’s attention 
was caught in spite of himself. 

“ Inflammatory classics.” 

“What’s that?” 

“ Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” 
said Prothero. “I can’t stand it any longer.” 

It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far 
away, in another world, such a statement might 
have been credible. Even in his own life, — it was 
now indeed a remote, forgotten stage — there had 
been something distantly akin. . . . 

“ You’re going to marry?” 

“I must.” 


310 


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“ Who's the lady, Billy ?” 

“I don’t know. Venus.” 

His little red-brown eye met his friend’s defiantly. 

“So far as I know, it is Venus Anadyomene.” 
A flash of laughter passed across his face and left it 
still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I 
like her best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! 
I feel that almost any of them — ” 

“Tut, tut!” said Benham. 

Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse. 

“Wasn’t it always your principle, Benham, to 
look facts in the face? I am not pronouncing an 
immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. 
I am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I 
feel. I want — Venus. I don’t want her to talk 
to or anything of that sort. ... I have been study- 
ing that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, 
all the morning, instead of doing any work. Would 
you like to see it? . . . No! . . . 

“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me 
mad. It is a peculiarly erotic spring. I cannot 
sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to ordi- 
nary conversation. These feelings, I understand, 
are by no means peculiar to myself. ... No, 
don’t interrupt me, Benham ; let me talk now that 
the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in 
you said, ‘How are you?’ I am telling you how I 
am. You brought it on yourself. Well — I am 
— inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious 
convictions to assist me either to endure or deny 
this — this urgency. And so why should I deny 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


311 


it? It’s one of our chief problems here. The ma- 
jority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive 
faces in hall and court and combination-room are 
in just the same case as myself. The fever in one- 
self detects the fever in others. I know their hidden 
thoughts. Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge 
their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable 
secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indif- 
ference. A tattered cloak. . . . Each tries to hide 
his abandonment to this horrible vice of conti- 
nence — ” 

" Billy, what’s the matter with you?” 

Prothero grimaced impatience. " Shall I never 
teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?” he 
screamed, and in screaming became calmer. " Na- 
ture taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a 
hell of shame. 'Get out from all these books,’ says 
Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.’ The Flesh, Benham. 
Yes — I insist — the Flesh. Do I look like a pure 
spirit? Is any man a pure spirit? And here am I 
at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much 
port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked 
Aspasia.” 

"Mutual, perhaps, Billy.” 

"Oh! you can sneer!” 

"Well, clearly — Saint Paul is my authority — 
it’s marriage, Billy.” 

Prothero had walked to the window. He turned 
round. 

"I can't marry,” he said. "The trouble has gone 
too far. I’ve lost my nerve in the presence of women, 


312 


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I don’t like them any more. They come at one — 
done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chatter- 
ing about all sorts of things that don’t matter. . . .” 

He surveyed his friend’s thoughtful attitude. 

“I’m getting to hate women, Benham. I’m be- 
ginning now to understand the bitterness of spinsters 
against men. I’m beginning to grasp the unkindli- 
ness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you, 
happily married, a woman is just a human being. 
You can talk to her, like her, you can even admire 
her calmly; you’ve got, you see, no grudge against 
her. ...” 

He sat down abruptly. 

Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty 
fireplace, considered him. 

“Billy! this is delusion,” he said. “What’s come 
over you?” 

“I’m telling you,” said Prothero. 

“No,” said Benham. 

Prothero awaited some further utterance. 

“I’m looking for the cause of it. It’s feeding, 
Billy. It’s port and stimulants where there is no 
scope for action. It’s idleness. I begin to see now 
how much fatter you are, how much coarser.” 

“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination 
answers. Look at that filing system like an arsenal 
of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow 
not idleness.” 

“There’s still bodily idleness. No. That’s your 
trouble. You’re stuffy. You’ve enlarged your 
liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 313 

after an extravagant breakfast — . And peep and 
covet.” 

“ Just eggs and bacon !” 

“ Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. 
Come out of it, Billy, and get aired.” 

“How can one?” 

“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, 
you Pig !” 

“IPs an infernally warm morning.” 

“Walk with me to Grantchester.” 

“We might go by boat. You could row.” 

“Walk” 

“I ought to do these papers.” 

“You weren’t doing them.” 

“No. . . *” 

“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this afflic- 
tion of yours is — horrid — and just nothing at all. 
Come out of it ! I want you to come with me to 
Russia and about the world. I’m going to leave 
my wife — ” 

“Leave your wife!” 

“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you 
clear-headed, and instead you are in this disgusting 
state. I’ve never met anything in my life so hot 
and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, 
man ! How can one talk to you?” 

§ 10 

“You pull things down to your own level,” said 
Benham as they went through the heat to Grant- 
chester. 


314 


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“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero. 

“ Truth! As though being full of gross appetites 
was truth, and discipline and training' some sort of 
falsity !” 

“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, 
begetting a prig’s pride.” 

For a time there was more than the heat of the 
day between them. . . . 

The things that Benham had come down to dis- 
cuss were thrust into the background by the im- 
passioned materialism of Prothero. 

“I’m not talking of Love,” he said, remaining 
persistently outrageous. “I’m talking of physical 
needs. That first. What is the good of arranging 
systems of morality and sentiment before you know 
what is physically possible. . . . 

“But how can one disentangle physical and moral 
necessities ? ” 

“Then why don’t we up and find out?” said Billy. 

He had no patience with the secrecy, the igno- 
rance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. 
We didn’t worship our ancestors when it came to 
building bridges or working metals or curing disease 
or studying our indigestion, and why should we be- 
come breathless or wordless with awe and terror 
when it came to this fundamental affair? Why 
here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear 
and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and 
the wisdom of the ages ? ‘ ‘ What is the wisdom of the 

ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where 
that wisdom was born. . . . Flea-bitten sages in 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


315 


stone-age hovels. . . . Wandering wise man with 
a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an 
Arab epileptic. . . .” 

“Would you sweep away the experience of man- 
kind?” protested Benham. 

The experience of mankind in these matters had 
always been bitter experience. Most of it was better 
forgotten. It didn’t convince. It had never worked 
things out. In this matter just as in every other 
matter that really signified things had still to be 
worked out. Nothing had been worked out hith- 
erto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. Peo- 
ple had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and 
running away. There wasn’t any digested experience 
of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered 
hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man. 

“Is this love-making a physical necessity for most 
men and women or isn’t it?” Prothero demanded. 
“There’s a simple question enough, and is there any- 
thing whatever in your confounded wisdom of the 
ages to tell me yes or no? Can an ordinary celi- 
bate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? 
Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being ? 
Can she be? I don’t believe so. Then why in 
thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre 
of learning and wisdom and I don’t believe so ; and 
there is nothing in all our colleges, libraries and 
roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain ques- 
tion for me, plainly and finally. My life is a grubby 
torment of cravings because it isn’t settled. If 
sexual activity is a part of the balance of life, if it is 


316 


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a necessity, well let’s set about making it accessible 
and harmless and have done with it. Swedish exer- 
cises. That sort of thing. If it isn’t, if it can be 
reduced and done without, then let us set about 
teaching people how to control themselves and re- 
duce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all 
this muffled mystery, this pompous sneak’s way we 
take with it!” 

“But, Billy! How can one settle these things? 
It’s a matter of idiosyncrasy. What is true for one 
man isn’t true for another. There’s infinite differ- 
ence of temperaments!” 

“Then why haven’t we a classification of temper- 
aments and a moral code for each sort ? Why am 
I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for 
Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like 
a glove ? It isn’t convenient for me. It fits me like 
a hair-shirt. Of course there are temperaments, 
but why can’t we formulate them and exercise the 
elementary charity of recognizing that one man’s 
health in these matters is another man’s death? 
Some want love and gratification and some don’t. 
There are people who want children and people who 
don’t want to be bothered by children but who are 
full of vivid desires. There are people whose only 
happiness is chastity, and women who would rather 
be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would 
concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea ; 
others overflow with a miscellaneous — tenderness. 
Yes, — and you smile ! Why spit upon and insult 
a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


317 


at it? Why try every one by the standards that 
suit oneself? We’re savages, Benham, shamefaced 
savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting. 

“I was angry about sex by seventeen,” he went on. 
“Every year I live I grow angrier.” 

His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he 
talked. 

“Think,” he said, “of the amount of thinking and 
feeling about sex that is going on in Cambridge this 
morning. The hundreds out of these thousands full 
of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none 
of it together ; we work nothing out from that but 
poor little couplings and casual stories, patchings 
up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, 
trouble, escapes ; and the next generation will start, 
and the next generation after that will start with 
nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn’t 
wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and 
mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage. . . . 

“What I really want to do is my work,” said 
Prothero, going off quite unexpectedly again. “That 
is why all this business, this incessant craving and 
the shame of it and all makes me so infernally 
angry. ...” 


§11 

“There I’m with you,” cried Benham, struggling 
out of the thick torrent of Prothero’s prepossessions. 
“What we want to do is our work.” 

He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to 
prevent Prothero getting the word again. 


318 


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“It’s this, that you call Work, that I call — what 
do I call it ? — living the aristocratic life, which takes 
all the coarse simplicity out of this business. If it 
was only submission. ... You think it is only 
submission — giving way. ... It isn’t only sub- 
mission. We’d manage sex all right, we’d be the 
happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn’t 
know all the time that there was something else to 
live for, something far more important. And dif- 
ferent. Absolutely different and contradictory. So 
different that it cuts right across all these consider- 
ations. It won’t fit in. . . . I don’t know what 
this other thing is; it’s what I want to talk about 
with you. But I know that it is, in all my bones. 
. . . You know. ... It demands control, it de- 
mands continence, it insists upon disregard.” 

But the ideas of continence and disregard were 
unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day. 

“ Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with 
this sex. It suffocates us. It gives life only to con- 
sume it. We struggle out of the urgent necessities 
of a mere animal existence. We are not so much 
living as being married and given in marriage. All 
life is swamped in the love story. ...” 

“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatis- 
fied,” said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view. 

§12 

It was only as they sat at a little table in the 
orchard at Grantchester after their lunch that Ben- 
ham. could make head against Prothero and recover 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


319 


that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched 
the imagination of Amanda. And then he did not 
so much dispose of Prothero’s troubles as soar over 
them. It is the last triumph of the human under- 
standing to sympathize with desires we do not share, 
and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved 
beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and 
tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible 
that Prothero’s demands should seem anything more 
than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the 
beast that has to be overridden and rejected alto- 
gether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that 
these most intense feelings in life are just those that 
are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate 
one may recall for years, but the magic of love and 
the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives 
and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of 
Venice. Benham was still not a year and a half 
from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmers- 
dale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel 
might look at a swine in its sty. . . . 

What he had now in mind was an expedition to 
Russia. When at last he could sufficiently release 
Prothero’s attention, he unfolded the project that 
had been developing steadily in him since his honey- 
moon experience. 

He had discovered a new reason for travelling. 
The last country we can see clearly, he had discover- 
ed, is our own country. It is as hard to see one’s own 
country as it is to see the back of one’s head. It is 
too much behind us, too much ourselves. But 


320 


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Russia is like England with everything larger, more 
vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked 
about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its 
Neva was like a savage untamed London on a 
larger Thames ; they were seagull-haunted tidal 
cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The ship- 
ping and buildings mingled in their effects. Like 
London it looked over the heads of its own people 
to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an 
aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no 
pride in itself as a class ; it had a British toughness 
and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and 
meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside 
Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and the 
opposition to that church was not secularism but 
dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted 
parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable 
stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great 
social organization. It was having its South African 
war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a 
certain defeat instead of a dubious victory. . . . 

“ There is far more freedom for the personal life 
in Russia than in England,” said Prothero, a little 
irrelevantly. 

Benham went on with his discourse about Russia. 

“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, 
“which I understand is a kind of monster Trinity 
unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me that 
although there is a profession of celibacy within the 
walls, the arrangements of the town and more par- 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


321 


ticularly of the various hotels are conceived in a 
spirit of extreme liberality.” 

Benham hardly attended at all to these interrup- 
tions. 

He went on to point out the elemental quality of 
the Russian situation. He led up to the assertion 
that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to grasp 
the broad outline of the Russian process, was the 
manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that 
was free to do as much. And so he was going, and 
if Prothero cared to come too — 

“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to 
Russia.” 

§ 13 

But throughout all their travel together that 
summer Benham was never able to lift Prothero away 
from his obsession. It was the substance of their 
talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting de- 
stroyers and winking beacons and the lights of 
Harwich, into the smoothly undulating darkness of 
the North Sea ; it rose upon them again as they sat 
over the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in 
the express for Berlin. Prothero filled the Sieges 
Allee with his complaints against nature and society, 
and distracted Benham in his contemplation of 
Polish agriculture from the windows of the train 
with turgid sexual liberalism. So that Benham, 
during this period until Prothero left him and until 
the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution 
took complete possession of him, was as it were 
thinking upon two floors. Upon the one he was 


322 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hun- 
dred million people staggering on the verge of 
anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by 
the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremen- 
dous things that were going on all about them. It 
was only presently when the serenity of his own pri- 
vate life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that 
he began to realize the intimate connexion of these 
two systems of thought. Yet Prothero put it to 
him plainly enough. 

“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am 
inattentive. What is really the matter with all this 
— this social mess people are in here, is that nearly 
everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of 
yours, nobody is thinking of them really. Every- 
body is thinking about the Near Things that con- 
cern himself.” 

“The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cos- 
sacks and the whips?” 

“Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If every- 
body was thinking of the Res Publica would there 
be any need for bombs?” 

He pursued his advantage. “IPs all nonsense to 
suppose people think of politics because they are in 
’em. As well suppose that the passengers on a liner 
understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before 
men can think of to-morrow, they must think of 
to-day. Before they can think of others, they must 
be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the 
private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe 
for food? Then sex, and until one is tranquil and 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


323 


not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied, how can 
one care for other people, or for next year or the 
Order of the World? How can one, Benham?” 

He seized the illustration at hand. “Here we are 
in Warsaw — not a month after bomb-throwing and 
Cossack charging. Windows have still to be mended, 
smashed doors restored. There’s blood-stains still 
on some of the houses. There are hundreds of people 
in the Citadel and in the Ochrana prison. This 
morning there were executions. Is it anything more 
than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch 
the customers in the shops, the crowd in the streets, 
the men in the cafes who stare at the passing women. 
They are all swallowed up again in their own busi- 
ness. They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped 
past ; they just shifted a bit when the bullets 
spat. ...” 

And when the streets of Moscow were agog with 
the grotesque amazing adventure of the Potemkin 
mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of the private 
romance that severed him from Benham and sent 
him back to Cambridge — changed. 

Before they reached Moscow Benham was already 
becoming accustomed to disregard Prothero. He 
was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble of 
Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under 
the hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm. 
In those days it looked as though it must be an over- 
whelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and 
massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the 
entangling streets, the houses with their strange 


324 


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lettering in black and gold, the innumerable bar- 
baric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the som- 
bre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous 
churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the 
innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. 
Basil, carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of 
permissible caricature, and in this setting the ob- 
scure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing 
peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, 
a thousand varieties of uniform, a running and gal- 
loping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little 
papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and 
portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation 
of tension going on to a perpetual clash and clamour 
of bells. Benham had brought letters of introduc- 
tion to a variety of people, some had vanished, it 
seemed. They were “away/’ the porters said, and 
they continued to be “away,” — it was the formula, 
he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few 
showed themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform 
him about things, to explain themselves and things 
about them exhaustively. One young student took 
him to various meetings and showed him in great 
detail the scene of the recent murder of the Grand 
Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the old 
French cannons were still under repair. “The 
assassin stood just here. The bomb fell there, look ! 
right down there towards the gate ; that was where 
they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. 
He was scraped up. He was mixed with the 
horses. ...” 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


325 


Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of 
revolution as a matter of days or at the utmost 
weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to 
ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except 
one. “And after the revolution,” he asked, “what 
then? . . . ” Then they waved their hands, and 
failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures. 

He was absorbed in his effort to understand this 
universal ominous drift towards a conflict. He was 
trying to piece together a process, if it was one and 
the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, 
fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote 
colossal battlings in Manchuria, the obscure move- 
ments of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in 
the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was 
trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend 
its direction. He was struggling strenuously with 
the obscurities of the language in which these things 
were being discussed about him, a most difficult 
language demanding new sets of visual images be- 
cause of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder that 
for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was 
involved in some entirely disconnected affair. 

They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar 
in the Theatre Square. Thither, through the doors 
that are opened by distraught-looking men with 
peacocks’ feathers round their caps, came Benham’s 
friends and guides to take him out and show him 
this and that. At first Prothero always accom- 
panied Benham on these expeditions ; then he 
began to make excuses. He would stay behind in 


326 


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the hotel. Then when Benham returned Prothero 
would have disappeared. When the porter was 
questioned about Prothero his nescience was pro- 
found. 

One night no Prothero was discoverable at any 
hour, and Benham, who wanted to discuss a project 
for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was alarmed. 

“ Moscow is a late place,” said Benham’s student 
friend. “You need not be anxious until after four 
or five in the morning. It will be quite time — quite 
time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be — close 
at hand.” 

When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room 
next morning he found him sleepy and irritable. 

“I don’t trouble if you are late,” said Prothero, 
sitting up in his bed with a red resentful face and 
crumpled hair. “I wasn’t born yesterday.” 

“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.” 

“I don’t want to leave Moscow.” 

“But Odessa — Odessa is the centre of interest 
just now.” 

“I want to stay in Moscow.” 

Benham looked baffled. 

Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night- 
shirted arms upon them. “I don’t want to leave 
Moscow,” he said, “and I’m not going to do so.” 

“But haven’t we done — ” 

Prothero interrupted. “You may. But I 
haven’t. We’re not after the same things. Things 
that interest you, Benham, don’t interest me. I’ve 
found — different things.” 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


327 


His expression was extraordinarily defiant. 

“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a 
different footing. Now you’ve opened the matter 
we may as well go into it. You were good enough to 
bring me here. . . . There was a sort of under- 
standing we were working together. ... We 
aren’t. . . . The long and short of it is, Benham, 
I want to pay you for my journey here and go on 
my own — independently.” 

His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that 
Benham found nearly incredible in him. 

Something that had got itself overlooked in the 
press of other matters jerked back into Benham’s 
memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an 
instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the 
window, picked his way among Prothero’s carelessly 
dropped garments, and stood for a moment staring 
into the square, with its drifting, assembling and 
dispersing fleet of trams and its long line of blue- 
coated izvoshtchiJcs. Then he turned. 

“Billy,” he said, “didn’t I see you the other 
evening driving towards the Hermitage?” 

“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that’s it.” 

“You were with a lady.” 

“And she is a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply 
moved that his face twitched as though he was 
going to weep. 

“She’s a Russian?” 

“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn’t 
stand there and look so damned ironical ! She’s 
— she’s a woman. She’s a thing of kindness. . . .” 


328 


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He was too full to go on. 

“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I 
don't want to be ironical — ” 

Prothero had got his voice again. 

“You'd better know,” he said, “you'd better 
know. She's one of those women who live in this 
hotel.” 

“Live in this hotel!” 

“On the fourth floor. Didn’t you know? It's 
the way in most of these big Russian hotels. They 
come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. 
A woman with a yellow ticket. Oh ! I don't care. I 
don't care a rap. She's been kind to me ; she's — 
she’s dear to me. How are you to understand? I 
shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. 
I can’t live without her, Benham. And then — 
And then you come worrying me to come to your 
damned Odessa !” 

And suddenly this extraordinary young man put 
his hands to his face as though he feared to lose it 
and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic mo- 
ment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his 
fingers. “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffo- 
catingly. “What business have you to come pry- 
ing on me?” 

Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the 
room and stared round-eyed at his friend. His 
hands were in his pockets. For a time he said 
nothing. 

“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again. 
“Billy, in this country somehow one wants to talk 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


329 


like a Russian. Billy, my dear — I’m not your 
father, I’m not your judge. I’m — unreasonably 
fond of you. It’s not my business to settle what is 
right or wrong for you. If you want to stay in 
Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as 
my guest. ...” 

Fie stopped and remained staring at his friend for 
a little space. 

“I didn’t know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I 
didn’t know it was possible to get so fond of a 
person. ...” 

Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero 
so attractive and so abominable in his life before. 

“I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I’ll make 
things all right here before I go. . . .” 

He closed the door behind him and went in a state 
of profound thought to his own room. . . . 

Presently Prothero came to him with a vague 
inopportune desire to explain what so evidently did 
not need explaining. He walked about the room 
trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed. 

In an unaccountable way Prothero’s bristling little 
mind seemed to have shrunken to something sleek 
and small. 

“I wish,” he said, “you could stay for a later 
train and have lunch and meet her. She’s not the 
ordinary thing. She’s — different.” 

Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. “Billy,” he 
said, “no woman is the ordinary thing. They are all 
— different. ...” 


330 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


§14 

For a time this affair of Prothero’s seemed to be a 
matter as disconnected from the Research Magnifi- 
cent as one could imagine any matter to be. While 
Benham went from Moscow and returned, and trav- 
elled hither and thither, and involved himself more 
and more in the endless tangled threads of the 
revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero was 
lost to all those large issues in the development of 
his personal situation. He contributed nothing to 
Benham’s thought except attempts at discourage- 
ment. He reiterated his declaration that all the 
vast stress and change of Russian national life was 
going on because it was universally disregarded. 
“I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody is 
attending. You think because all Moscow, all 
Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is con- 
cerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares what 
is happening. Even the men who write in news- 
papers and talk at meetings about it don’t care. 
They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, 
of their money, of their wives. They hurry 
home. . . . ” 

That was his excuse. 

Manifestly it was an excuse. 

His situation developed into remarkable compli- 
cations of jealousy and divided counsels that Ben- 
ham found altogether incomprehensible. To Ben- 
ham in those days everything was very simple in 
this business of love. The aristocrat had to love 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


331 


ideally; that was all. He had to love Amanda. 
He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, 
more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before. 
They were now writing love-letters to each other 
and enjoying a separation that was almost volup- 
tuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of 
her surrender to him and to the natural fate of 
women, a delightful exercise for her very consider- 
able powers of expression. Life pointed now won- 
derfully to the great time ahead when there would 
be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the 
Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty 
quest. In such terms she put it. Such foolishness 
written in her invincibly square and youthful hand 
went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up 
against his return in the porter’s office at the Cos- 
mopolis Bazaar or pursued him down through the 
jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or waited 
for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his 
journeyings wastefully or in several instances went 
altogether astray. Perhaps they supplied self- 
educating young strikers in the postal service with 
useful exercises in the deciphering of manuscript 
English. He wrote back five hundred different ways 
of saying that he loved her extravagantly. . . . 

It seemed to Benham in those days that he had 
found the remedy and solution of all those sexual 
perplexities that distressed the world ; Heroic Love 
to its highest note — and then you go about your 
business. It seemed impossible not to be happy and 
lift one’s chin high and diffuse a bracing kindliness 


332 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in 
affliction and hate because they had failed as yet 
to find this simple, culminating elucidation. And 
Prothero — Prothero, too, was now achieving the 
same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and pro- 
tests and general physical squalor he had flowered 
into love. For a time it is true it made rather an 
ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere 
goose-stepping for the triumphal march ; this way 
ultimately lay exaltation. Benham had had as yet 
but a passing glimpse of this Anglo-Russian, who was 
a lady and altogether unlike her fellows ; he had 
seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and 
Prothero drove past him, and his impression was of a 
rather little creature, white-faced with dusky hair 
under a red cap, paler and smaller but with some- 
thing in her, a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch 
of kinship with Amanda. And if she liked old 
Prothero — And, indeed, she must like old Proth- 
ero or could she possibly have made him so deeply 
in love with her? 

They must stick to each other, and then, pres- 
ently, Prothero’s soul would wake up and face the 
world again. What did it matter what she had 
been? 

Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums 
of strained anxiety and the physical dangers of a 
barbaric country staggering towards revolution, 
Benham went with his own love like a lamp within 
him and this affair of Prothero’s reflecting its light, 
and he was quite prepared for the most sympathetic 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


333 


and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow 
to make the lady’s acquaintance. He intended to 
help Prothero to marry and take her back to Cam- 
bridge, and to assist by every possible means in 
destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket 
that defined her status in Moscow. But he reck- 
oned without either Prothero or the young lady in 
this expectation. 

It only got to him slowly through his political 
preoccupations that there were obscure obstacles to 
this manifest course. Prothero hesitated ; the lady 
expressed doubts. 

On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda 
diminished. It was chiefly a similarity of com- 
plexion. She had a more delicate face than 
Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened ; 
she had none of Amanda’s glow, and she spoke her 
mother’s language with a pretty halting limp that 
was very different from Amanda’s clear decisions. 

She put her case compactly. 

“I would not do in Cambridge,” she said with an 
infinitesimal glance at Prothero. 

“Mr. Benham,” she said, and her manner had the 
gravity of a woman of affairs, “now do you see me in 
Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept outside 
the walls? In a little datcha ? With no occupa- 
tion? Just to amuse him.” 

And on another occasion when Prothero was not 
with her she achieved still completer lucidity. 

“I would come if I thought he wanted me to 
come,” she said. “But you see if I came he would 


334 


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not want me to come. Because then he would have 
me and so he wouldn’t want me. He vrould just 
have the trouble. And I am not sure if I should 
be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should 
be happy enough to make him happy. It is a very 
learned and intelligent and charming society, of 
course ; but here, things happen. At Cambridge 
nothing happens — there is only education. There 
is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even 
sinful people to be sorry for. . . . And he says 
himself that Cambridge people are particular. He 
says they are liberal but very, very particular, and 
perhaps I could not always act my part well. Some- 
times I am not always well behaved. When there 
is music I behave badly sometimes, or when I am 
bored. He says the Cambridge people are so 
liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he 
says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully 
how you are what you are. ... So that it comes 
to exactly the same thing. ...” 

“Anna Alexievna,” said Benham suddenly, “are 
you in love with Prothero?” 

Her manner became conscientiously scientific. 

“He is very kind and very generous — too gener- 
ous. He keeps sending for more money — hun- 
dreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.” 

“Were you ever in love?” 

“Of course. But it’s all gone long ago. It was 
like being hungry. Only very fine hungry. Ex- 
quisite hungry. . . . And then being disgusted ” 

“He is in love with you.” 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


335 


“What is love?” said Anna. “He is grateful. 
He is by nature grateful.” She smiled a smile, like 
the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on her 
bambino. 

“And you love nothing?” 

“I love Russia — and being alone, being com- 
pletely alone. When I am dead perhaps I shall be 
alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.” 

Then she added, “But I shall be sorry when he 
goes.” 

Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. 
“Your Anna,” he said, “is rather wonderful. At 
first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her very 
much, I thought she looked ‘used/ she drank vodka 
at lunch, she was gay, uneasily ; she seemed a sham 
thing. All that was prejudice. She thinks ; she’s 
generous, she’s fine.” 

“She’s tragic,” said Prothero as though it was 
the same thing. 

He spoke as though he noted an objection. His 
next remark confirmed this impression. “That’s 
why I can’t take her back to Cambridge,” he said. 

“You see, Benham,” he went on, “she’s human. 
She’s not really feminine. I mean, she’s — unsexed. 
She isn’t fitted to be a wife or a mother any more. 
We’ve talked about the possible life in England, very 
plainly. I’ve explained what a household in Cam- 
bridge would mean. ... It doesn’t attract her. 
... In a way she’s been let out from womanhood, 
forced out of womanhood, and I see now that when 
women are let out from womanhood there’s no put- 


336 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. 
I see now that if women are going to be wives and 
mothers and homekeepers and ladies, they must be 
got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never 
really let out into the wild chances of life. She has 
been. Bitterly. She’s really emancipated. And 
it’s let her out into a sort of nothingness. She’s no 
longer a woman, and she isn’t a man. She ought to 
be able to go on her own — like a man. But I 
can’t take her back to Cambridge. Even for her 
sake.” 

His perplexed eyes regarded Benham. 

“You won’t be happy in Cambridge — alone,” 
said Benham. 

“Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I 
had at first some idea of coming to Moscow for good 
— teaching.” 

He paused. “Impossible. I’m worth nothing 
here. I couldn’t have kept her.” 

“Then what are you going to do, Billy?” 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, I tell you. 
I live for the moment. To-morrow we are going 
out into the country.” 

“I don’t understand,” said Benham with a ges- 
ture of resignation. “It seems to me that if a man 
and woman love each other — well, they insist upon 
each other. What is to happen to her if you leave 
her in Moscow?” 

“Damnation ! Is there any need to ask that?” 

“Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cam- 
bridge objects, teach Cambridge better manners.” 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


337 


Prothero’s face was suddenly transfigured with 
rage. 

“I tell you she won’t come !” he said. 

“ Billy !” said Benham, “you should make her !” 

“I can’t.” 

“If a man loves a woman he can make her do 
anything — ” 

“But I don’t love her like that,” said Prothero, 
shrill with anger. “I tell you I don’t love her like 
that.” 

Then he lunged into further deeps. ' ' It’s the other 
men,” he said, “it’s the things that have been. 
Don’t you understand? Can’t you understand? 
The memories — she must have memories — they 
come between us. It’s something deeper than rea- 
son. It’s in one’s spine and under one’s nails. One 
could do anything, I perceive, for one’s very own 
woman. ...” 

“ Make her your very own woman,” said the ex- 
ponent of heroic love. 

‘ ‘ I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How 
could any man make her his very own woman now? 
You — you don’t seem to understand — anything. 
She’s nobody’s woman — for ever. That — that 
might-have-been has gone for ever. . . . It’s nerves 
— a passion of the nerves. There’s a cruelty in 
life and — She’s kind to me. She’s so kind to 
me. ...” 

And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed 
child. 


z 


338 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


§15 

The end of Prothero’s first love affair came to 
Benham in broken fragments in letters. When he 
looked for Anna Alexievna in December — he never 
learnt her surname — he found she had left the 
Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero’s departure 
and he could not find whither she had gone. He 
never found her again. Moscow and Russia had 
swallowed her up. 

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a 
foregone conclusion. But Prothero’s manner of 
parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock 
to Benham’s ideas. It was clear he went off almost 
callously; it would seem there was very little cry- 
ing. Towards the end it was evident that the two 
had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very 
end of all. It was almost as if he had got through 
the passion and was glad to go. Then came regret, 
a regret that increased in geometrical proportion 
with every mile of distance. 

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Proth-. 
ero. He had some hours there and he prowled the 
crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy with 
their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full 
of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and 
again flashed out some instant resemblance to 
Anna. . . . 

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided 
that he would go back. “ But now I had the damned 
frontier,” he wrote, “ between us.” 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


339 


It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham 
thought, to let the “damned frontier” tip the bal- 
ance against him. 

Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so 
passionate that it seemed as if Prothero had been 
transfigured. “I can’t stand this business,” he 
wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emo- 
tional disturbance — you can have no idea ! In the 
train - — luckily I was alone in the compartment — 
I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help 
it, I was weeping — noisy weeping, an uproar ! A 
beastly German came and stood in the corridor to 
stare. I had to get out of the train. It is dis- 
graceful, it is monstrous we should be made like 
this. . . . 

“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to 
do but to write to you about my dismal feelings. ...” 

After that surely there was nothing before a 
broken-hearted Prothero but to go on with his trail- 
ing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable regrets ; 
but again Benham reckoned without the invincible 
earthliness of his friend. Prothero stayed three 
nights in Paris. 

“There is an extraordinary excitement about 
Paris,” he wrote. “A levity. I suspect the gypsum 
in the subsoil — some as yet undescribed radia- 
tions. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical. 
. . . None of those tear-compelling German ema- 
nations. . . . 

“And, Benham, I have found a friend. 

“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will 


340 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


sneer. You do not understand these things. . . . 
Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest acci- 
dent brought us together. There was something 
that drew us together. A sort of instinct. Near 
the Boulevard Poissoniere. . . . ” 

“Good heavens !” said Benham. “A sort of 
instinct !” 

“I told her all about Anna!” 

“Good Lord!” cried Benham. 

“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so- 
called ‘ respectable ’ women could have understood. 
... At first I intended merely to talk to her. ...” 

Benham crumpled the letter in his hand. 

“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were 
too clean for him.” 


§10 

Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from 
all this foreign travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, 
and yet not without a kind of relief, to the grey 
mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and 
gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, 
nodding greetings, resuming friendships. 

The little man merged again into his rare company 
of discreet Benedicts and restrained celibates at the 
high tables. They ate on in their mature wisdom 
long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently 
they would withdraw processionally to the combi- 
nation room. . . . 

There would be much to talk about over the 


wine. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


341 


Benham speculated what account Prothero would 
give of Moscow. . . . 

He laughed abruptly. 

And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of 
Benham’s world for a space of years. There may 
have been other letters, but if so they were lost in 
the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post- 
office. Perhaps to this day they linger sere and 
yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev 
or Ekaterinoslav. . . . 


§17 

In November, after an adventure in the trader’s 
quarter of Kieff which had brought him within an 
inch of death, and because an emotional wave had 
swept across him and across his correspondence with 
Amanda, Benham went back suddenly to England 
and her. He wanted very greatly to see her and also 
he wanted to make certain arrangements about his 
property. He returned by way of Hungary, and 
sent telegrams like shouts of excitement whenever 
the train stopped for a sufficient time. “Old Leop- 
ard, I am coming, I am coming,” he telegraphed, 
announcing his coming for the fourth time. It was 
to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the 
mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then 
he was returning to Russia again. 

Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found 
her installed in the utmost dignity of expectant 
maternity. Like many other people he had been a 
little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a 


342 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


common human experience ; at Chexington he came 
to think of it as a rare and sacramental function. 
Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey, 
dove-like tones ; her sun-touched, boy’s complexion 
had given way to a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, 
her brisk little neck that had always reminded him 
of the stalk of a flower was now softened and 
rounded ; her eyes were tender, and she moved about 
the place in the manner of one who is vowed to 
a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and 
Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her 
eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was 
the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of 
her daughter-in-law’s unparalleled immolation. The 
motif of motherhood was everywhere, and at his 
bedside he found — it had been put there for him 
by Amanda — among much other exaltation of 
woman’s mission, that most wonderful of all philo- 
progenitive stories, Hudson’s Crystal Age . 

Everybody at Chexington had an air of being 
grouped about the impending fact. An epidemic of 
internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in the 
depths of London society, but to make up for his 
absence Mrs. Morris had taken a little cottage down 
by the river and the Wilder girls were with her, both 
afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it 
seemed, and more particularly Betty, prepared to 
be keenly critical of Benham’s attitude. 

He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, 
because he had returned in a rather different vein of 
exaltation. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


343 


In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, 
who had at moments an effect upon him of a priest- 
ess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she put 
aside for him something official, something sincerely 
maintained, necessary, but at times a little irksome. 
It was as if she was glad to take him into her con- 
fidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda 
an impish Amanda still lingered. 

There were aspects of Amanda that it was mani- 
fest dear Betty must never know. . . . 

But the real Amanda of that November visit even 
in her most unpontifical moods did not quite come 
up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him 
home across Europe. At times she was extraordi- 
narily jolly. They had two or three happy walks 
about the Chexington woods ; that year the golden 
weather of October had flowed over into November, 
and except for a carpet of green and gold under the 
horse-chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the 
trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone 
on him. And then would come something else, 
something like a shadow across the world, some- 
thing he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic 
love had flooded him, something that reminded him 
of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone- 
Sanders that had never been explained, and of the 
curate in the doorway of the cottage and his un- 
accountable tears. 

On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he 
was a little surprised to find Sir Philip Easton com- 
ing through the house into the garden, with an 


344 


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accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him 
with a start that was instantly controlled, and 
greeted him with unnatural ease. 

Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and 
playing cricket in the neighbourhood, which struck 
Benham as a poor way of spending the summer, the 
sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from 
scholars and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he 
thought, ought to have been aviating or travelling. 

Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it 
seemed to Benham that there was a flavour of es- 
tablished association in their manner. But then Sir 
Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. 
She called him “Pip,” and afterwards Amanda called 
across the tennis-court to him, “Pip ! ” And then he 
called her “Amanda.” When the Wilder girls came 
up to join the tennis he was just as brotherly. . . . 

The next day he came to lunch. 

During that meal Benham became more aware 
than he had ever been before of the peculiar deep 
expressiveness of this young man’s eyes. They 
watched him and they watched Amanda with a 
solicitude that seemed at once pained and tender. 
And there was something about Amanda, a kind of 
hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of some- 
thing undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an 
intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip 
would be spoken to privately, and that then he would 
pack up and go away in a state of illumination from 
Chexington. But before he could be spoken to he 
contrived to speak to Benham. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


345 


They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it 
was he took advantage of a pause to commit his little 
indiscretion. 

“Mrs. Bonham/’ he said, “looks amazingly well 
— extraordinarily well, don’t you think?” 

“Yes,” said Benham, startled. “Yes. She cer- 
tainly keeps very well.” 

“She misses you terribly,” said Sir Philip; “it is 
a time when a woman misses her husband. But, of 
course, she does not want to hamper your work. ...” 

Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so 
intimate an interest in these matters, but on the 
spur of the moment he could find no better expres- 
sion for this than a grunt. 

“You don’t mind,” said the young man with a 
slight catch in the breath that might have been 
apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and 
flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep 
life interesting down here ? It’s not very congenial. 

. . . She’s so wonderful — I think she is the 
most wonderful woman in the world.” 

Benham perceived that so far from being a modern 
aristocrat he was really a primitive barbarian in 
these matters. 

“I’ve no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every 
reason to be grateful for your attentions.” 

In the little pause that followed Benham had a 
feeling that Sir Philip was engendering something 
still more personal. If so, he might be constrained 
to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of 
chrysanthemums over Sir Philip’s head, or kick him 


346 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


in an improving manner. He had a ridiculous belief 
that Sir Philip would probably take anything of the 
sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind 
for some remark that would avert this possibility. 

“ Have you ever been in Russia ? ” he asked hastily. 
“It is the most wonderful country in Europe. I 
had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a pog- 
rom/ ? 

And he drowned the developing situation in a 
flood of description. . . . 

But it was not so easy to drown the little things 
that were presently thrown out by Lady Marayne. 
They were so much more in the air. . . . 

§ is 

Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as 
Benham had foreseen. 

“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days 
later to Amanda. 

“I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. 
. . . But otherwise he is rather a comfort, Chee- 
tah.” She meditated upon Sir Philip. “And he’s 
an honourable man,” she said. “He’s safe. . . 

§ 19 

After that visit it was that the notes upon love and 
sex began in earnest. The scattered memoranda 
upon the perfectness of heroic love for the modern 
aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the 
first draft for a study of jealousy. The note was 
written in pencil on Chexington notepaper and mani- 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


347 


festly that had been supported on the ribbed cover 
of a book. There was a little computation in the 
corner, converting forty-five degrees Reaumur into 
degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it 
had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it 
had been written in a rather amateurishly stoked 
corridor-train on Benham’s journey to the gathering 
revolt in Moscow. . . . 

“I think I have been disposed to underrate the 
force of sexual jealousy. ... I thought it was 
something essentially contemptible, something that 
one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere 
effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that 
it is not quite so easily settled with. . . . 

“One likes to know. . . . Possibly one wants 
to know too much. ... In phases of fatigue, and 
particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one is 
leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an 
irrational torment. . . . 

“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished 
by the power of this base motive. I see, too, in the 
queer business of Prothero how strongly jealousy, 
how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with 
a man. . . . 

“There is no clear reason why one should insist 
upon another human being being one’s ownest own 
— utterly one’s own. . . . 

“There is, of course, no clear reason for most 
human motives. . . . 

“One does. . . . 

“There is something dishonouring in distrust 


348 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


— to both the distrusted and the one who dis- 
trusts. ...” 

After that, apparently, it had been too hot and 
stuffy to continue. 


§20 

Benham did not see Amanda again until after the 
birth of their child. He spent his Christmas in 
Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful fighting 
and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and 
taking care of a lost and helpless English family 
whose father had gone astray temporarily on the 
way home from Baku. Then he went southward to 
Rostov and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really 
began his travels. He determined to get to India by 
way of Herat and for the first time in his life rode 
out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went 
on obstinately because he found himself disposed to 
funk the journey, and because discouragements were 
put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all 
the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it 
is to be flea-bitten, saddle-sore, hungry and, above 
all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread of fever, 
and so contrived strange torments for himself with 
overdoses of quinine. He ceased to be traceable 
from Chexington in March, and he reappeared in 
the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding 
news in May. He learnt he was the father of a 
man-child and that all was well with Amanda. 

He had not expected to be so long away from any 
communication with the outer world, and something 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


349 


in the nature of a stricken conscience took him back 
to England. He found a second William Porphyry 
in the world, dominating Chexington, and Amanda 
tenderly triumphant and passionate, the Madonna 
enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no 
emotion. William Porphyry was very red and ugly 
and protesting, feeble and aggressive, a matter for 
a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him and 
dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned 
again. 

For some days he was content to adore his 
Madonna and listen to the familiar flatteries of her 
love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda said, 
and wiser, so that she was afraid of him. . . . 

And then he became aware that she was requiring 
him to stay at her side. “We have both had our 
adventures,” she said, which struck him as an odd 
phrase. 

It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that 
all those conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness 
he had supposed to be so clearly understood between 
them had vanished from her mind. She had abso- 
lutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window 
which had seemed to him the crowning instant, the 
real marriage of their lives. It had gone, it had left 
no recoverable trace in her. And upon his interpre- 
tations of that he had loved her passionately for a 
year. She was back at exactly the ideas and in- 
tentions that ruled her during their first settlement 
in London. She wanted a joint life in the social 
world of London, she demanded his presence, his 


350 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


attention, the daily practical evidences of love. 
It was all very well for him to be away when the 
child was coming, but now everything was different. 
Now he must stay by her. 

This time he argued no case. These issues he had 
settled for ever. Even an indignant dissertation 
from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began with 
appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. 
Behind these things now was India. The huge 
problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold 
upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he 
wanted to balance that picture by a vision of the 
east. . . . 

He saw Easton only once during a week-end at 
Chexington. The young man displayed no further 
disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But 
he seemed to have something on his mind. And 
Amanda said not a word about him. He was a 
young man above suspicion, Benham felt. . . . 

And from his departure the quality of the corre- 
spondence of these two larger carnivores began to 
change. Except for the repetition of accustomed 
endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any 
sense of the word. They dealt chiefly with the 
“Cub,” and even there Benham felt presently that 
the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing qual- 
ity for Amanda appeared — triteness. The very 
writing of her letters changed as though it had sud- 
denly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness of 
phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation ? 
Was she ill unknowingly? Where had the light 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


351 


gone? It was as if her attention was distracted. 
... As if every day when she wrote her mind was 
busy about something else. 

Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had 
never been stated, never formulated, never in any 
way admitted, was suddenly pointed to convergently 
by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond ques- 
tion perceived to be there. . . . 

He left a record of that moment of realization. 

“ Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and 
it was as if I had never seen Amanda before. Now 
I saw her plainly, I saw her with that same dreadful 
clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, 
a scientific distinctness that has neither light nor 
shadow. . . . 

“Of course,” I said, and then presently I got up 
very softly. . . . 

“I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, 
personal cabin. I wanted to feel the largeness of 
the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off 
the coast of Madras, and when I think of that 
moment, there comes back to me also the faint flavour 
of spice in the air, the low line of the coast, the cool 
flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the 
swish of the black water against the side of the 
ship. And a perception of infinite loss, as if the limit- 
less heavens above this earth and below to the very 
uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from 
which delight had fled. . . . 

“Of course I had lost her. I knew it with abso- 
lute certainty. I knew it from her insecure temper- 


352 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it 
from every line she had written me in the last three 
months. I knew it intuitively. She had been un- 
faithful. She must have been unfaithful. 

“What had I been dreaming about to think that 
it would not be so?” 


§21 

“Now let me write down plainly what I think of 
these matters. Let me be at least honest with 
myself, whatever self-contradictions I may have 
been led into by force of my passions. Always I 
have despised jealousy. . . . 

“Only by the conquest of four natural limitations 
is the aristocratic life to be achieved. They come in 
a certain order, and in that order the spirit of man is 
armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear 
and my struggle against fear I have told already. I 
am fearful. I am a physical coward until I can 
bring shame and anger to my assistance, but in 
overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole 
body of human tradition. Every one, the basest 
creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature 
that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the 
instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and 
that fear is shameful and must be subdued. The 
race is on one’s side. And so there is a vast tradi- 
tional support for a man against the Second Limita- 
tion, the limitation of physical indulgence. It is 
not so universal as the first, there is a grinning bawl- 
ing humour on the side of grossness, but common 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


353 


pride is against it. And in this matter my tem- 
perament has been my help : I am fastidious, I eat 
little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil from 
excess. It is no great virtue ; it happens so ; it is 
something in the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure 
myself unshaven or in any way unclean ; I am tor- 
mented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty mem- 
ories, and after I had once loved Amanda I could 
not — unless some irrational impulse to get equal 
with her had caught me — have broken my faith to 
her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me. . . . 

“I see that in these matters I am cleaner than 
most men and more easily clean; and it may be 
that it is in the vein of just that distinctive virtue 
that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment 
and anger. 

“I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional 
discredit of jealousy, not so strong as that against 
cowardice, but still very strong. But the general 
contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with 
the supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, 
that it is unreasonable suspicion. Given a cause 
then tradition speaks with an uncertain voice. . . . 

“I see now that I despised jealousy because I as- 
sumed that it was impossible for Amanda to love 
any one but me ; it was intolerable to imagine any- 
thing else, I insisted upon believing that she was as 
fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made 
indeed after my image, and I went on disregarding 
the most obvious intimations that she was not, until 
that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently, 
2a 


354 


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gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths 
of a pool, that knowledge of love dead and honour 
gone for ever floated up into my consciousness. 

“And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! 
Outrageously. Abominably. 

“Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not 
a cloud upon this question. My demand upon 
Amanda was outrageous and I had no right what- 
ever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very 
clear. . . . 

“This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, 
except accidentally here and there, incompatible 
with the domestic life. It means going hither and 
thither in the universe of thought as much as in the 
universe of matter, it means adventure, it means 
movement and adventure that must needs be hope- 
lessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it 
means self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit 
into the welfare of a family. In all ages, directly 
society had risen above the level of a barbaric tribal 
village, this need of a release from the family for 
certain necessary types of people has been recog- 
nized. It was met sometimes informally, sometimes 
formally, by the growth and establishment of special 
classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged 
knights, of a great variety of non-family people, 
whose concern was the larger collective life that 
opens out beyond the simple necessities and duties 
and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman’s 
house. Sometimes, but not always, that release 
took the form of celibacy; but besides that there 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


355 


have been a hundred institutional variations of the 
common life to meet the need of the special man, 
the man who must go deep and the man who must 
go far. A vowed celibacy ceased to be a tolerable 
rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea 
entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristoc- 
racy means the abandonment of the racial future 
to a proletariat of base unleaderly men. That was 
plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was 
plain to the Protestant reformers. But the world 
has never yet gone on to the next step beyond that 
recognition, to the recognition of feminine aristo- 
crats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled 
by domestic servitudes and family relationships as 
the men of their kind. That I see has always been 
my idea since in my undergraduate days I came 
under the spell of Plato. It was a matter of course 
that my first gift to Amanda should be his Republic. 
I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream. . . . 

“ There are no such women. . . . 

“It is no excuse for me that I thought she was 
like-minded with myself. I had no sound reason for 
supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not 
perceive that not only was she younger than myself, 
but that while I had been going through a mill of 
steely education, kept close, severely exercised, 
polished by discussion, she had but the weak train- 
ing of a not very good school, some scrappy reading, 
the vague discussions of village artists, and the 
draped and decorated novelties of the 1 advanced.’ 
It all went to nothing on the impact of the world. . . . 


356 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


She showed herself the woman the world has always 
known, no miracle, and the alternative was for 
me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to 
serve her happiness, to control her and delight and 
companion her, or to let her go. . . . 

* “The normal woman centres upon herself; her 
mission is her own charm and her own beauty and 
her own setting; her place is her home. She de- 
mands the concentration of a man. Not to be able 
to command that is her failure. Not to give her 
that is to shame her. As I had shamed Amanda ” 

§22 

“There are no such women.” He had written 
this in and struck it out, and then at some later 
time written it in again. There it stayed now as his 
last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubt- 
ing. And, indeed, there was another sheet of pen- 
cilled broken stuff that seemed to glance at quite 
another type of womanhood. 

§23 

“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must 
come to the remaking of the world will do so in spite 
of limitations at least as great as those from which 
the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women 
must become aristocratic through their own innate 
impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, ex- 
actly as men must be ; there is no making an aristo- 
crat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. 
And they have to discover and struggle against just 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


357 


exactly the limitations that we have to struggle 
against. They have to conquer not only fear but 
indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious 
quality, and jealousy — proprietorship. . . . 

“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, 
and a thousand times in my work and in my wander- 
ings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate. 
A mate — not a possession. It is a need almost 
naively simple. If only one could have a woman 
who thought of one and with one ! Though she were 
on the other side of the world and busied about a 
thousand things. . . . 

“‘With one/ I see it must be rather than ‘of 
one.’ That ‘of one’ is just the unexpurgated ego- 
tistical demand coming back again. . . . 

“Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be 
alone. But mating means a mate. . . . 

“We should be lovers, of course; that goes with- 
out saying. . . . 

“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, 
attending lovers. ‘ Dancing attendance ’ — as they 
used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the 
great carnivores do. . . . 

“That at any rate was a sound idea. Though 
we only played with it. 

“But that mate desire is just a longing that can 
have no possible satisfaction now for me. What is 
the good of dreaming ? Life and chance have played 
a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, 
though I am mated to a phantom. I loved and I 
love Amanda, not Easton’s Amanda, but Amanda in 


358 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and 
particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than 
reason in us. There can be no mate for me now 
unless she comes with Amanda’s voice and Amanda’s 
face and Amanda’s quick movements and her clever 
hands. . . . 


§24 

“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the 
happiness she gave me? 

“There were things between us two as lovers, 
— love, things more beautiful than anything else in 
the world, things that set the mind hunting among 
ineffectual images in a search for impossible expres- 
sion, images of sunlight shining through blood-red 
petals, images of moonlight in a scented garden, of 
marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful 
music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies 
dancing softly, of floating happiness and stirring 
delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of 
an assassin, assassin’s knives made out of tears, 
tears that are happiness, wordless things; and sur- 
prises, expectations, gratitudes, sudden moments of 
contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed in 
sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard 
unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I 
can find no words for. . . . 

“If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair 
of mine that she was not a goddess to herself ; that 
she could hold all this that has been between us more 
cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


359 


it for me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. 
She forgets where I do not forget. . . . ” 

§25 

Such were the things that Benham could think 
and set down. 

Yet for whole days he was possessed by the 
thought of killing Amanda and himself. 

He did not at once turn homeward. It was in 
Ceylon that he dropped his work and came home. 
At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him, 
and there were two of these that had started at the 
same time. They had been posted in London on one 
eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda 
had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, 
quick-breathing women, full of neat but belated 
repartee, separated to write their simultaneous 
letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that 
truncated encounter. Lady Marayne told her story 
ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand, general- 
ized, and explained. Sir Philip’s adoration of her 
was a love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. 
Was there no trust nor courage in the world? She 
would defy all jealous scandal. She would not 
even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah 
could trust her. But the pitiless facts of Lady 
Marayne went beyond Amanda’s explaining. The 
little lady’s dignity had been stricken. “I have 
been used as a cloak,” she wrote. 

Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very 
words of Amanda, words she had overheard at Chex- 


360 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ington in the twilight. They were no invention. 
They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. 
It was as sure as if Benham had heard the sound 
of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she 
had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It 
brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, 
reckless ; his wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight. 
... All day those words of hers pursued him. All 
night they flared across the black universe. He 
buried his face in the pillows and they whispered 
softly in his ear. 

He walked his room in the darkness longing to 
smash and tear. 

He went out from the house and shook his ineffec- 
tual fists at the stirring quiet of the stars. 

He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did 
he come back with a definite plan. But he wanted 
to get at Amanda. 

§26 

It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards 
Easton he felt scarcely any anger at all. Easton he 
felt only existed for him because Amanda willed to 
have it so. 

Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a 
contemptuous anger. His devotion filled Benham 
with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at 
any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and 
slights for her, his humility, his service and ten- 
derness, his care for her moods and happiness, 
seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


361 


That rage against Easton was like the rage of a 
trade-unionist against a blackleg. Are all the women 
to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves 
and keepers? But it was not simply that Benham 
felt men must be freed from this incessant attend- 
ance ; women too must free themselves from their 
almost instinctive demand for an attendant. . . . 

His innate disposition was to treat women as 
responsible beings. Never in his life had he thought 
of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and won 
and competed for and fought over. So that it was 
Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, 
Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses only 
to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and 
jealous fury. But the forces that were driving him 
home now were the forces below the level of reason 
and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and 
desire, profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, 
indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on 
deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion 
of exasperating images that ever and again would 
so wring him that his muscles would tighten and 
his hands clench or he would find himself restraining 
a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat. 

Amanda grew upon his imagination until she over- 
shadowed the whole world. She filled the skies. 
She bent over him and mocked him. She became 
a mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the 
sin of the world. One breathed her in the winds 
of the sea. She had taken to herself the greatness 
of elemental things. . . . 


362 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


So that when at last he saw her he was amazed 
to see her, and see that she was just a creature of 
common size and quality, a rather tired and very 
frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an 
evening-dress of unfamiliar fashion, with little common 
trinkets of gold and colour about her wrists and neck. 

In that instant’s confrontation he forgot all that 
had brought him homeward. He stared at her as one 
stares at a stranger whom one has greeted in mistake 
for an intimate friend. 

For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he 
hated and desired to kill than she had ever been the 
Amanda he had loved. 


§27 

He took them by surprise. It had been his inten- 
tion to take them by surprise. Such is the inelegance 
of the jealous state. 

He reached London in the afternoon and put up at 
a hotel near Charing Cross. In the evening about 
ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster Gate. 
The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham 
was, he said, at a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, 
and he thought some other people also. He did not 
know when she would be back. She might go on to 
supper. It was not the custom for the servants to 
wait up for her. 

Benham went into the study that reduplicated his 
former rooms in Finacue Street and sat down before 
the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the man to 
bed, and fell into profound meditation. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


363 


It was nearly two o’clock when he heard the sound 
of her latchkey and went out at once upon the land- 
ing. 

The half-door stood open and Easton’s car was 
outside. She stood in the middle of the hall and 
relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was carrying. 

“ Good-night,” she said, “I am so tired.” 

“My wonderful goddess,” he said. 

She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, 
then started, stared, and wrenched herself out of his 
arms. 

Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking 
down upon them, white-faced and inexpressive. 
Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment no 
one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton 
shut the half-door and shut out the noises of the road. 

For some seconds Benham regarded them, and 
as he did so his spirit changed. . . . 

Everything he had thought of saying and doing 
vanished out of his mind. 

He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended 
the staircase. When he was five or six steps above 
them, he spoke. “ Just sit down here,” he said, with 
a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the 
stairs. “Do sit down,” he said with a sudden testi- 
ness as they continued standing. “I know all 
about this affair. Do please sit down and let us 
talk. . , . Everybody’s gone to bed long ago.” 

“Cheetah!” she said. “Why have you come 
back like this?” 

Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet. 


364 


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“I wish you would sit down, Easton/’ he said in a 
voice of subdued savagery. 

“Why have you come back?” Sir Philip Easton 
found his voice to ask. 

“Sit down,” Benham spat, and Easton obeyed 
unwillingly. 

“I came back,” Benham went on, “to see to all 
this. Why else ? I don’t — now I see you — feel 
very fierce about it. But it has distressed me. You 
look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair 
is untidy. It’s as if something had happened to 
you and made you a stranger. ... You two people 
are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to 
get out of it. Yes, I want to get out of it. That 
wasn’t quite my idea, but now I see it is. It’s queer, 
but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us, poor 
humans — . There’s reason to be sorry for all of us. 
We’re full of lusts and uneasiness and resentments 
that we haven’t the will to control. What do you 
two people want me to do to you? Would you like 
a divorce, Amanda? It’s the clean, straight thing, 
isn’t it? Or would the scandal hurt you?” 

Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on 
Benham. 

“Give us a divorce,” said Easton, looking to her 
to confirm him. 

Amanda shook her head. 

“I don’t want a divorce,” she said. 

“Then what do you want?” asked Benham with 
sudden asperity. 

“I don’t want a divorce,” she repeated. “Why 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


365 


do you, after a long silence, come home like this, 
abruptly, with no notice?” 

“It was the way it took me,” said Benham, after a 
little interval. 

“You have left me for long months.” 

“Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be 
angry. I thought I wanted to kill you, and now I see 
you I see that all I want to do is to help you out of 
this miserable mess — and then get away from you. 
You two would like to marry. You ought to be 
married.” 

“I would die to make Amanda happy,” said 
Easton. 

“Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make 
her happy. That you may find more of a strain. 
Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the other hand, 
want neither to die nor live for her.” Amanda 
moved sharply. “It's extraordinary what amazing 
vapours a lonely man may get into his head. If 
you don't want a divorce then I suppose things 
might go on as they are now.” 

“I hate things as they are now,” said Easton. “I 
hate this falsehood and deception.” 

“You would hate the scandal just as much,” said 
Amanda. 

“I would not care what the scandal was unless it 
hurt you.” 

“It would be only a temporary inconvenience,” 
said Benham. “Every one would sympathize with 
you. . . . The whole thing is so natural. . . . 
People would be glad to forget very soon. They did 
with my mother,” 


3G0 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

“No,” said Amanda, “it isn’t so easy as that.” 

She seemed to come to a decision. 

“Pip,” she said. “I want to talk to— r him — 
alone.” 

Easton’s brown eyes were filled with distress and 
perplexity. “But why?” he asked. 

“I do,” she said. 

“But this is a thing for us .” 

“Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is some- 
thing — something I can’t say before you. ...” 

Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet. 

“Shall I wait outside?” 

“No, Pip. Go home. Yes, — there are some 
things you must leave to me.” 

She stood up too and turned so that she and Ben- 
ham both faced the younger man. The strangest 
uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be at any cost 
splendid. He felt — and it was a most unexpected 
and disconcerting feeling — that he was no longer 
confederated with Amanda ; that prior, more funda- 
mental and greater associations prevailed over his 
little new grip upon her mind and senses. He 
stared at husband and wife aghast in this realization. 
Then his resolute romanticism came to his help. 
“I would trust you — ” he began. “If you tell me 
to go — ” 

Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him. 

She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear 
Pip,” she said. “Go.” 

He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and 
it seemed to Benham as though he eked himself out 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


367 


with unreality, as though somewhen, somewhere, he 
had seen something of the sort in a play and filled 
in a gap that otherwise he could not have sup- 
plied. 

Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, 
pale and darkly dishevelled, faced her husband, 
silently and intensely. 

“Well?” said Benham. 

She held out her arms to him. 

“Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you 
leave me?” 


§28 

Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. 
But they recalled in a swift rush the animal anger 
that had brought him back to England. To remind 
him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger 
than any desire. He spoke seeking to hurt her. 

“I am wondering now,” he said, “why the devil I 
came back.” 

“You had to come back to me.” 

“I could have written just as well about these 
things.” 

“Cheetah” she said softly, and came towards him 
slowly, stooping forward and looking into his eyes, 
“you had to come back to see your old Leopard. 
Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the 
dirt. And is still yours.” 

“Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix 
things, Amanda?” 

“Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.” 


368 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


She dropped upon the step below him. She laid 
her hands with a deliberate softness upon him, she 
gave a toss so that her disordered hair was a little 
more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to 
touch his knees. Her eyes implored him. 

“Cheetah,” she said. “You are going to forgive.” 

He sat rigid, meeting her eyes. 

“Amanda,” he said at last, “you would be aston- 
ished if I kicked you away from me and trampled 
over you to the door. That is what I want to 
do.” 

“Do it,” she said, and the grip of her hands 
tightened. “Cheetah, dear! I would love you to 
kill me.” 

“I don’t want to kill you.” 

Her eyes dilated. “Beat me.” 

“And I haven’t the remotest intention of making 
love to you,” he said, and pushed her soft face and 
hands away from him as if he would stand up. 

She caught hold of him again. “Stay with me,” 
she said. 

He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked 
at the dark cloud of her hair that had ruled him so 
magically, and the memory of old delights made him 
grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he 
spoke. “Dear Leopard,” he said, “we humans are 
the most streaky of conceivable things. I thought 
I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And 
also I do not hate you at all.” 

Then abruptly he was standing over her. 

She rose to her knees. 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


369 


“Stay here, old Cheetah !” she said. “This is 
your house. I am your wife.” 

He went towards the unfastened front door. 

“Cheetah !” she cried with a note of despair. 

He halted at the door. 

“Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in 
the morning, in the sober London daylight, and 
then we will settle things.” 

He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. 
He spoke as one who remarks upon a quite unex- 
pected fact. . . . 

“Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human 
being that I wanted so little to kill.” 

§29 

White found a fragment that might have been 
written within a week of those last encounters of 
Benham and Amanda. 

“The thing that astonished me most in Amanda 
was the change in her mental quality. 

“With me in the old days she had always been a 
sincere person ; she had deceived me about facts, but 
she had never deceived me about herself. Her 
personal, stark frankness had been her essential 
strength. And it was gone. I came back to find 
Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses 
and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, 
a Lorelei. Beneath that surface I could not discover 
anything individual at all. Fear and a grasping 
quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us 
hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous 


370 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


wilful Spotless Leopard was gone. Whither, I can- 
not imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean 
out of space and time like a soul lost for ever. 

“When I went to see her in the morning, she was 
made up for a scene, she acted an intricate part, 
never for a moment was she there in reality. . . . 

“I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost 
herself in this way, by cheapening love, by making 
base love to a lover she despised. . . . There can 
be no inequality in love. Give and take must 
balance. One must be one’s natural self or the whole 
business is an indecent trick, a vile use of life ! To 
use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to 
them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, 
pretend, sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless 
oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave 
alone all those people that one can reach only by 
sentimentalizing. But Amanda — and yet some- 
how I love her for it still — could not leave any one 
alone. So she was always feverishly weaving nets 
of false relationship. Until her very self was for- 
gotten. So she will go on until the end. With 
Easton it had been necessary for her to key herself 
to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirety 
insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these 
poses that her innate gestures were forgotten. She 
could not recover them ; she could not even reinvent 
them. Between us there were momentary gleams 
as though presently we should be our frank former 
selves again. They were never more than momen- 
tary. . . .* 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


371 


And that was all that this astonishing man had 
seen fit to tell of his last parting from his wife. 

Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there 
was a stronger thread of reality in her desire to re- 
cover him than he supposed. Clearly he believed 
that under the circumstances Amanda would have 
tried to recover anybody. 

She had dressed for that morning’s encounter in a 
very becoming and intimate wrap of soft mauve and 
white silk, and she had washed and dried her dark 
hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She 
Set herself with a single mind to persuade herself 
and Benham that they were inseparable lovers, 
and she would not be deflected by his grim determi- 
nation to discuss the conditions of their separation. 
When he asked her whether she wanted a divorce, 
she offered to throw over Sir Philip and banish him 
for ever as lightly as a great lady might sacrifice an 
objectionable poodle to her connubial peace. 

Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that 
she herself began to feel that her practice with Easton 
had spoilt her hands. His initial grimness she 
could understand, and partially its breakdown into 
irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. 
For he laughed abruptly. 

“You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of 
tremendous tragedy. And really, — you are a Lark. ’ ’ 

And then overriding her altogether, he told her 
what he meant to do about their future and the future 
of their little son. 

“You don’t want a divorce and a fuss. Then I’ll 


372 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


leave things. I perceive I’ve no intention of marry- 
ing any more. But you’d better do the straight 
thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when 
there is no one about making a fuss against you. 

“ Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said 
for shirking it. We’ll both be able to get at the boy 
then. You’ll not hurt him, and I shall want to see 
him. It’s better for the boy anyhow not to have a 
divorce. 

"I’ll not stand in your way. I’ll get a little flat 
and I shan’t come too much to London, and when I 
do, you can get out of town. You must be discreet 
about Easton, and if people say anything about 
him, send them to me. After all, this is our private 
affair. 

“We’ll go on about money matters as we have been 
going. I trust to you not to run me into over- 
whelming debts. And, of course, if at any time, 
you do want to marry — on account of children or 
anything — if nobody knows of this conversation 
we can be divorced then. . . 

Benham threw out these decisions in little dry 
sentences while Amanda gathered her forces for her 
last appeal. 

It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she 
flung herself down before him and clung to his knees. 
He struggled ridiculously to get himself clear, and 
when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate 
on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her. 

She heard the door close behind him, and still she 
lay there, a dark Guinevere, until with a start she 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


373 


heard a step upon the thick carpet without. He 
had come back. The door reopened. There was a 
slight pause, and then she raised her face and met the 
blank stare of the second housemaid. There are 
moments, suspended fragments of time rather than 
links in its succession, when the human eye is more 
intelligible than any words. 

The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise 
and vanished with a click of the door. 

“ Damn! 11 said Amanda. 

Then slowly she rose to her knees. 

She meditated through vast moments. 

“It’s a cursed thing to be a woman,” said Amanda. 

She stood up. She put her hand on the telephone 
in the corner and then she forgot about it. After 
another long interval of thought she spoke. 

“ Cheetah !” she said, “Old Cheetah! . . . 

“I didn’t think it of you. . . .” 

Then presently with the even joyless movements of 
one who does a reasonable business, with something 
indeed of the manner of one who packs a trunk, she 
rang up Sir Philip Easton. 

§30 

The head chambermaid on the first floor of the 
Westwood Hotel in Danebury Street had a curious 
and perplexing glimpse of Benham’s private pro- 
cesses the morning after this affair. 

Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of 
his return to London. She had seen him twice or 
three times, and he had struck her as a coldly dec- 


374 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


orous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking ; the 
last man to behave violently or surprise a head 
chambermaid in any way. On the morning of his 
departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that 
the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an 
uproar in the night, and almost immediately she 
was summoned to see Benham. 

He was standing facing the door and in a position 
which did a little obscure the condition of the room 
behind him. He was carefully dressed, and his 
manner was more cold and decorous than ever. 
But one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage. 

“I am going this morning,” he said, “I am going 
down now to breakfast. I have had a few little 
accidents with some of the things in the room and I 
have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager 
and see that they are properly charged for on the 
bill. . . . Thank you.” 

The head chambermaid was left to consider the 
accidents. 

Benham’s things were all packed up and the room 
had an air of having been straightened up neatly and 
methodically after a destructive cataclysm. One or 
two items that the chambermaid might possibly have 
overlooked in the normal course of things were care- 
fully exhibited. For example, the sheet had been 
torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side 
by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece 
had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded 
to pieces. All the looking-glasses in the room were 
smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


375 


the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off 
and flung or hammered about amidst the other 
breakables. And there was a considerable amount 
of blood splashed about the room. The head 
chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the 
spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, 
the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid. 
The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and 
several housemaids displayed a respectful interest 
in the matter. Finally they invoked the manager. 
He was still contemplating the scene of the disorder 
when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates 
warned him of Benham’s return. 

Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing 
was reassuringly tranquil. 

“I had a kind of nightmare,” he said. “I am 
fearfully sorry to have disarranged your room. You 
must charge me for the inconvenience as well as 
for the damage.” 

§31 

“An aristocrat cannot be a lover.” 

“One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the 
wider issues of life and the intricacies of another 
human being. I do not mean that one may not 
love. One loves the more because one does not 
concentrate one’s love. One loves nations, the 
people passing in the street, beasts hurt by the 
wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons 
in tears. . . . 

“But if one does not give one’s whole love and life 


376 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


into a woman’s hands I do not think one can expect 
to be loved. 

“An aristocrat must do without close personal 
love. . . 

This much was written at the top of a sheet of 
paper. Tfie writing ended halfway down the page. 
Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it 
was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this 
confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and 
Third Lihtotations. Its incompleteness made its 
expression perfect. . . . 

There Benham’s love experience ended. He 
turned to the great business of the world. Desire and 
Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like Fear 
they were to be dismissed as far as possible and 
subdued when they could not be altogether dismissed. 
Whatever stirrings of blood or imagination there 
were in him after that parting, whatever failures 
from this resolution, they left no trace on the rest 
of his research, which was concerned with the hates 
of peoples and classes and war and peace and the 
possibilities science unveils and starry speculations 
of what mankind may do. 

§32 

But Benham did not leave England again until he 
had had an encounter with Lady Marayne. 

The little lady came to her son in a state of ex- 
traordinary ~nger and distress. Never had she 
seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly dis- 
persed and mixed. And when for a moment it 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


377 


seemed to him that she was not as a matter of fact 
dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant 
eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. 
“What are you doing in England, Poff?” she de- 
manded. “And what are you going to do? 

“Nothing! And you are going to leave her in 
your house, with your property and a lover. If 
that’s it, Poff, why did you ever come back? And 
why did you ever marry her? You might have 
known; her father was a swindler. She’s begotter 
of deceit. She’ll tell her own story while you are 
away, and a pretty story she’ll make of it.” 

“Do you want me to divorce her and make a 
scandal?” 

“I never wanted you to go away from her. If 
you’d stayed and watched her as a man should, as I 
begged you and implored you to do. Didn’t I tell 
you, Poff? Didn’t I warn you?” 

“But now what am I to do?” 

^There you are ! That’s just a man’s way. You 
get yourself into this trouble, you follow your 
passions and your fancies and fads and then you 
turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If 
you’d listened to me before !” 

Her blue eyes were demonstratively round. 

“Yes, but — ” 

“I warned you,” she interrupted. “I warned 
you. I’ve done all I could for you. It isn’t that I 
haven’t seen through her. When she came to me 
at first with that made-up story of a baby ! And all 
about loving me like her own mother. But I did 


378 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


what I could. I thought we might still make the 
best of a bad job. And then — . I might have 
known she couldn’t leave Pip alone. . . . But for 
weeks I didn’t dream. I wouldn’t dream. Right 
under my nose. The impudence of it!” 

Her voice broke. “Such a horrid mess! Such a 
hopeless, horrid mess!” 

She wiped away a bright little tear. . . . 

“It’s all alike. It’s your way with us. All of 
you. There isn’t a man in the world deserves to 
have a woman in the world. We do all we can fof 
you. We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for 
you and we talk for you. All the sweet, warm little 
women there are! And then you go away from 
us ! There never was a woman yet who pleased 
and satisfied a man, who did not lose him. Give 
you everything and off you must go ! Lovers, 
mothers. ...” 

It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother’s 
troubles did not deal exclusively with himself. 

“But Amanda,” he began. 

“If you’d looked after her properly, it would have 
been right enough. Pip was as good as gold until 
she undermined him. ... A woman can’t wait 
about like an umbrella in a stand. . . . He was 
just a boy. . . . Only of course there she was — a 
novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She 
flattered him. . . . Men are such fools.” 

“Still — it’s no good saying that now.” 

“But she’ll spend all your money, Poff! She’ll 
break your back with debts. What’s to prevent 


THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY 


379 


her? With him living on her! For that's what it 
comes to practically." 

“Well, what am I to do?" 

“You aren't going back without tying her up, 
Poff? You ought to stop every farthing of her 
money — every farthing. It's your duty." 

“I can't do things like that." 

“But have you no Shame? To let that sort of 
thing go on !" 

“If I don't feel the Shame of it — And I 
don't." 

“And that money — . I got you that money, PofT ! 
It was my money." 

Benham stared at her perplexed. “What am I to 
do?" he asked. 

“Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay 
her through a solicitor. Say that if she sees him 
once again — " 

He reflected. “No," he said at last. 

“Poff!" she cried, “every time I see you, you are 
more and more like your father. You’re going off — 
just as he did. That baffled, mulish look — priggish 
— solemn ! Oh ! it's strange the stuff a poor woman 
has to bring into the world. But you’ll do nothing. 
I know you’ll do nothing. You’ll stand everything. 
You — you Cuckold ! And she’ll drive by me, she'll 
pass me in theatres with the money that ought to 
have been mine ! Oh ! Oh ! " 

She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming 
eye to the other. But she went on talking. Faster 
and faster, less and less coherently ; more and more 


380 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the 
storm Benham sighed profoundly. . . . 

It brought the scene to a painful end. . . . 

For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him. 

He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some 
obscure way he was in default, that he was to blame 
for her distress, that he owed her — he could never 
define what he owed her. 

And yet, what on earth was one to do ? 

And something his mother had said gave him the 
odd idea that he had misjudged his father, that he 
had missed depths of perplexed and kindred goodwill. 
He went down to see him before he returned to 
India. But if there was a hidden well of feeling in 
Mr. Benham senior, it had been very carefully 
boarded over. The parental mind and attention 
were entirely engaged in a dispute in the School 
World about the heuristic method. Somebody had 
been disrespectful to Martindale House and the 
thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed 
to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the 
essentially illogical position of his assailant. He was 
entirely inattentive to Benham’s carefully made 
conversational opportunities. He would be silent 
at times while Benham talked and then he would 
break out suddenly with: “What seems to me so 
unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that 
fellow’s second argument — if one can call it an 
argument — ... A man who reasons as he does is 
bound to get laughed at. If people will only see 
it. . . ” 


CHAPTER THE SIXTH 
The New Haroun al Raschid 
§1 

Benham corresponded with Amanda until the 
summer of 1913. Sometimes the two wrote coldly 
to one another, sometimes with warm affection, 
sometimes with great bitterness. When he met 
White in Johannesburg during the strike period of 
1913, he was on his way to see her in London and to 
settle their relationship upon a new and more definite 
footing. It was her suggestion that they should 
meet. 

About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dis- 
satisfaction. He could not persuade himself that his 
treatment of her and that his relations to her squared 
with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at 
no precise point could he detect where he had defi- 
nitely taken an ignoble step. Through Amanda he 
was coming to the full experience of life. Like all of 
us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to 
take life in a certain way, and life had taken him, as 
it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unex- 
pected way. . . . He had been ready for noble 
deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, 
and here as the dominant fact of his personal life 
381 


382 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


was a perplexing riddle. He could not hate and 
condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow 
of exoneration ; he could not think of her tolerantly 
or lovingly without immediate shame and resent- 
ment, and with the utmost will in the world he could 
not banish her from his mind. 

During the intervening years he had never ceased 
to have her in his mind ; he would not think of her it 
is true if he could help it, but often he could not help 
it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she 
was almost more potent than she had been as a thing 
accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irri- 
tability increased, but it did not hinder the steady 
development of his Research. 

Long before his final parting from Amanda he had 
worked out his idea and method for all the more 
personal problems in life; the problems he put 
together under his headings of the first three “ Limita- 
tions.’^ ’ He had resolved to emancipate himself from 
fear, indulgence, and that instinctive preoccupation 
with the interests and dignity of self which he chose 
to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous 
exception of Amanda he had to a large extent suc- 
ceeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda. He stuck 
the more grimly to his Research to drown that beat- 
ing in his brain. 

Emancipation from all these personal things he held 
now to be a mere prelude to the real work of a man’s 
life, which was to serve this dream of a larger human 
purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and 
define that purpose, that purpose which must be the 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 383 


directing and comprehending form of all the activities 
of the noble life. One cannot be noble, he had come 
to perceive, at large ; one must be noble to an end. 
To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing 
more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous 
and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the 
fundamental intention of all nobility. He believed 
more and more firmly that the impulses to make and 
help and subserve great purposes are abundantly pres- 
ent in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty 
thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that 
the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a 
creation as a release. He lumped the preventive and 
destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, 
and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and he 
made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most 
difficult limitation. In one place he had written it, 
“Prejudice or Divisions.” That being subdued in 
oneself and in the world, then in the measure of 
its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great 
age, the noble age, would begin. 

So he set himself to examine his own mind and the 
mind of the world about him for prejudice, for ham- 
pering follies, disguised disloyalties and mischievous 
distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White 
struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to 
various aspects of this search for “Prejudice.” It 
seemed to White to be at once the most magnificent 
and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was 
indeed no less than an enquiry into all the preventable 
sources of human failure and disorder. . . . And it 


384 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


was all too manifest to White also that the last 
place in which Benham was capable of detecting a 
prejudice was at the back of his own head. . . . 

Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most 
remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national 
suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and 
social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle 
headedness, every dividing force indeed except the 
purely personal dissensions between man and man. 
And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of 
these troubles. “No doubt/’ he wrote in one place, 
“much of the evil between different kinds of men is 
due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, 
but far more is it due to bad thinking.” At times he 
seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most 
human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics. 
It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey 
he had made; he had started from chivalry and 
arrived at metaphysics ; every knight he held must 
be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the 
mind. One thinks of his coming to this conclusion 
with knit brows and balancing intentness above 
whole gulfs of bathos — very much as he had once 
walked the Leysin Bisse. . . . 

“Men do not know how to think,” he insisted — 
getting along the planks ; “and they will not realize 
that they do not know how to think. Nine-tenths 
of the wars in the world have arisen out of miscon- 
ceptions. . . . Misconception is the sin and dis- 
honour of the mind, and muddled thinking as ignoble 
as dirty conduct. . . . Infinitely more disastrous.” 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 385 


And again he wrote: “Man, I see, is an over- 
practical creature, too eager to get into action. 
There is our deepest trouble. He takes conclusions 
ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so 
short that he thinks it better to err than wait. He 
has no patience, no faith in anything but himself. 
He thinks he is a being when in reality he is only a 
link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be com- 
plete than right. The last devotion of which he is 
capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers 
partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive 
thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his 
performance, and before he is dead it is already being 
abandoned and begun all over again by some one 
else in the same egotistical haste. . . 

It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life 
that these words should have been written by a man 
who walked the plank to fresh ideas with the dizziest 
difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward, 
and who acted time after time with an altogether 
disastrous hastiness. 


§2 

Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey 
of Benham’s from the cocked hat and wooden sword 
of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice and 
baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete 
Research Magnificent. You can no more resolve 
to live a life of honour nowadays and abstain from 
social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, 
than you can profess religion and refuse to think 
2c 


386 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


about God. In the past it was possible to take all 
sorts of things for granted and be loyal to unexamined 
things. One could be loyal to unexamined things 
because they were unchallenged things. But now 
everything is challenged. By the time of his second 
visit to Russia, Benham’s ideas of conscious and 
deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of 
universal responsibility had already grown into the 
extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an 
uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to be 
aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows 
that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an 
aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philoso' 
pher and king. . . . 

Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this 
world are by no means necessarily noble, and that 
most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in spirit, 
conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall 
far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there is nobility, 
there is kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and man- 
kind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet. From 
that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first 
expression had already so touched the imagination of 
Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship 
scattered throughout mankind. The aristocrats are 
not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, 
those who are enthroned are but pretenders and 
simulacra , kings of the vulgar; the real king and 
ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions 
and self-interest of the common life for the rule and 
service of the world. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 387 


This is an idea that is now to be found in much 
contemporary writing. It is one of those ideas that 
seem to appear simultaneously at many points in the 
world, and it is impossible to say now how far Ben- 
ham was an originator of this idea, and how far he 
simply resonated to its expression by others. It was 
far more likely that Prothero, getting it heaven 
knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, 
leaving it to germinate in the mind of his friend. . . . 

This lordly, this kingly dream became more and 
more essential to Benham as his life went on. When 
Benham walked the Bisse he was just a youngster 
resolved to be individually brave ; when he prowled 
in the jungle by night he was there for all mankind. 
With every year he became more and more definitely 
to himself a consecrated man as kings are conse- 
crated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and 
anointed only in his heart. At last he was, so to 
speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going unsuspected 
about the world, because the palace of his security 
would not tell him the secrets of men’s disorders. 
He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he 
was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the 
Danes. In the great later accumulations of his 
Research the personal matter, the introspection, the 
intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and less. 
He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. 
He worries less and less over the particular rightness 
of his definite acts. In these later papers White 
found Benham abstracted, self-forgetful, trying to 
find out with an ever increased self-detachment, with 


388 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are 
massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why 
we let famine, disease and beasts assail us, and want 
dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the midst of 
possible plenty. And when he found out and as far 
as he found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly 
to apply his knowledge. . . . 

§3 

The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the 
end. His definition of Prejudice impressed White as 
being the most bloodless and philosophical formula 
that ever dominated the mind of a man. 

“Prejudice,” Benham had written, “is that com- 
mon incapacity of the human mind to understand 
that a difference in any respect is not a difference in 
all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by 
an instinctive hostility to what is unlike ourselves. 
We exaggerate classification and then charge it with 
mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.” 
And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded 
to study and attack Family Prejudice, National 
Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice, 
Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most 
industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one 
regards one’s self or others he held that these prej- 
udices are evil things. “From the point of view 
of human welfare they break men up into wars and 
conflicts, make them an easy prey to those who trade 
upon suspicion and hostility, prevent sane collective 
co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From the 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 389 


point of view of personal aristocracy they make 
men vulgar, violent, unjust and futile. All the 
conscious life of the aristocrat must be a constant 
struggle against false generalizations ; it is as much 
his duty to free himself from that as from fear, 
indulgence, and jealousy ; it is a larger and more 
elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and 
essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. 
The true knight has to be not only no coward, no 
self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a philoso- 
pher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His 
judgment no more than his courage is to be taken 
by surprise. 

“To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aris- 
tocrat’s personal affair, it is his ritual and discipline, 
like a knight watching his arms ; but the destruction 
of division and prejudice and all their forms and 
establishments, is his real task, that is the common 
work of knighthood. It is a task to be done in a 
thousand ways; one man working by persuasion, 
another by example, this one overthrowing some 
crippling restraint upon the freedom of speech and 
the spread of knowledge, and that preparing himself 
for a war that will shatter a tyrannous presumption. 
Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation, 
all sound criticism, all good building, all good manu- 
facture, all sound politics, every honesty and every 
reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men 
from the heat and confusions of our present world.” 

It was clear to White that as Benham progressed 
with this major part of his research, he was more and 


390 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


more possessed by the idea that he was not making his 
own personal research alone, but, side by side with a 
vast, masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude 
of others; that this great idea of his was under 
kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that it 
was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously 
to great numbers of people, and that the time was not 
far off when the new aristocracy, the disguised rulers 
of the world, would begin to realize their common 
bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps 
more and more frequently a new phraseology, such 
expressions as the “ Invisible King” and the “ Spirit 
of Kingship,” so that as Benham became personally 
more and more solitary, his thoughts became more 
and more public and social. 

Benham was not content to define and denounce 
the prejudices of mankind. He set himself to study 
just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get at 
the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of 
prejudice, and to devise means for its treatment, 
destruction or neutralization. He had no great 
faith in the power of pure reasonableness ; his 
psychological ideas were modern, and he had grasped 
the fact that the power of most of the great prejudices 
that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual 
level. Consequently he sought to bring himself 
into the closest contact with prejudices in action 
and prejudices in conflict in order to discover their 
sub-rational springs. 

A large proportion of that larger moiety of the 
material at Westhaven Street which White from his 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 391 


extensive experience of the public patience decided 
could not possibly “make a book,” consisted of 
notes and discussions upon the first-hand observa- 
tions Benham had made in this or that part of the 
world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary 
trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from 
place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during 
a pogrom he had his first really illuminating en- 
counter with race and culture prejudice. His 
examination of the social and political condition of 
Russia seems to have left him much more hopeful 
than was the common feeling of liberal-minded 
people during the years of depression that followed 
the revolution of 1906, and it was upon the race 
question that his attention concentrated. 

The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to 
India. Here in an entirely different environment 
was another discord of race and culture, and he found 
in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected 
his impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer 
was devoted to a comparatively finished and very 
thorough enquiry into human dissensions in lower 
Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture 
conflicts, and he could, work particularly upon the 
differences between men of the same race who were 
Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively. 
He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only 
with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with the 
Mahometan from the north-west. “If one could 
scrape off all the creed and training, would one find 
much the same thing at the bottom, or something 


392 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


fundamentally so different that no close homogene- 
ous social life and not even perhaps a life of just 
compromise is possible between the different races 
of mankind?” 

His answer to that was a confident one. “ There 
are no such natural and unalterable differences in 
character and quality between any two sorts of men 
whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly 
co-operation in the world impossible,” he wrote. 

But he was not satisfied with his observations in 
India. He found the prevalence of caste ideas anti- 
pathetic and complicating. He went on after his last 
parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of 
several visits to China, and thence he crossed to 
America. White found a number of American press- 
cuttings of a vehemently anti- Japanese quality still 
awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to 
him that Benham had given a considerable amount 
of attention to the development of the “ white” and 
“ yellow” race hostility on the Pacific slope; but 
his chief interest at that time had been the negro. 
He went to Washington and thence south ; he visited 
Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent 
to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh 
Pritchard’s vivid book, Where Black Rules White , 
and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to visit that 
wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness 
of La Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the 
“Black Napoleon,” the Emperor Christophe. He 
went with a young American demonstrator from 
Harvard. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 393 


§4 

It was a memorable excursion. They rode from 
Cap Haytien for a day’s journey along dusty uneven 
tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious vegeta- 
tion, that presented the strangest mixture of un- 
bridled jungle with populous country. They passed 
countless villages of thatched huts alive with curiosity 
and swarming with naked black children, and yet all 
the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They 
forded rivers, they had at times to force themselves 
through thickets, once or twice they lost their way, 
and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the 
great mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest 
rose slowly out of the background until it dominated 
the landscape. Long after dark they blundered 
upon rather than came to the village at its foot where 
they were to pass the night. They were interrogated 
under a flaring torch by peering ragged black soldiers, 
and passed through a firelit crowd into the presence 
of the local commandant to dispute volubly about 
their right to go further. They might have been 
in some remote corner of Nigeria. Their papers, 
laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the fact, 
which only became apparent by degrees, that the 
commandant could not read. They carried their 
point with difficulty. 

But they carried their point, and, watched and 
guarded by a hungry half-naked negro in a kepi and 
the remains of a sky-blue pair of trousers, they 
explored one of the most exemplary memorials of 


394 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


imperialism that humanity has ever made. The 
roads and parks and prospects constructed by this 
vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long since disap- 
peared, and the three men clambered for hours up ra- 
vines and precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally cross- 
ing the winding traces of a choked and ruined road 
that had once been the lordly approach to his fastness. 
Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast ex- 
tent, a palace with great terraces and the still trace- 
able outline of gardens, though there were green 
things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees 
thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a bel- 
vedere of which the skuli-like vestige still remained, 
the negro Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years 
of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of 
the burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and 
then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted him, 
had gone in and blown out his brains. 

He had christened the place after the best of 
examples, “Sans Souci.” 

But the citadel above, which was to have been his 
last defence, he never used. The defection of his 
guards made him abandon that. To build it, they 
say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the 
true Imperial lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a 
wilderness of trees and bush, looking out over a land 
relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch 
and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical 
sky — for even the guards who still watched over its 
suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly 
galleries and had made hovels outside its walls -• 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 395 


and at the same time so huge and grandiose — there 
were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores 
of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king’s 
apartments and queen’s apartments, towering battle- 
ments and great arched doorways — that it seemed 
to Benham to embody the power and passing of that 
miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless 
bowing of multitudes before one man and the tran- 
sitoriness of such glories, more completely than any- 
thing he had ever seen or imagined in the world 
before. Beneath the battlements — they are choked 
above with jungle grass and tamarinds and many 
flowery weeds — the precipice fell away a sheer two 
thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green 
plain populous and diversified, bounded at last by 
the blue sea, like an amethystine wall. Over this 
precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, 
and below this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons 
where men, broken and torn, thrust in at the neck-like 
hole above, starved and died : it was his headquarters 
here, here he had his torture chambers and the means 
for nameless cruelties. . . . 

“Not a hundred years ago,” said Benham’s com- 
panion, and told the story of the disgraced favourite, 
the youth who had offended. 

“Leap,” said his master, and the poor hypnotized 
wretch, after one questioning glance at the conceivable 
alternatives, made his last gesture of servility, and 
then stood out against the sky, swayed, and with a 
convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down 
through the shimmering air. 


396 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Came presently the little faint sound of his fall. 

The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of 
the fact that this projectile he had launched had 
caught among the bushes below, and presently strug- 
gled and found itself still a living man. It could 
scramble down to the road and, what is more wonder- 
ful, hope for mercy. An hour and it stood before 
Christophe again, with an arm broken and bloody 
and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint 
flavour of pride in its bearing. “Your bidding has 
been done, Sire,” it said. 

“So,” said the Emperor, unappeased. “And you 
live? Well — Leap again. ...” 

And then came other stories. The young man told 
them as he had heard them, stories of ferocious whole- 
sale butcheries, of men standing along the walls of the 
banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the 
feast went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, 
and his one note of wonder, his refrain was, “Here! 
Not a hundred years ago. ... It makes one almost 
believe that somewhere things of this sort are being 
done now.” 

They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy 
flowery ruins. The lizards which had fled their 
coming crept out again to bask in the sunshine. 
The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with 
his black fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of 
Christophe in a search for some saleable me- 
mento. . . . 

Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of 
deliberate cruelty was always an actual physical 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 397 


distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy after- 
noon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that 
crowded into his mind, pictures of men aghast at 
death, and of fear-driven men toiling in agony, and of 
the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing and 
crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous 
hate beaten down under blow and anguish. He saw 
eyes alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, 
he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud 
destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, 
and he shivered in his soul. . . . 

He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe ; 
he hated pride, and then the idea came to him that it 
is not pride that makes Christophes but humility. 

There is in the medley of man’s composition, deeper 
far than his superficial working delusion that he is a 
separated self-seeking individual, an instinct for co- 
operation and obedience. Every natural sane man 
wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly 
guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life. 
At the bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does not 
know it definitely, that his life is partial. He is 
driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the 
appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider’s 
voice. One thinks of the pride, the uncontrolled 
frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one 
forgets the universal docility that made him possible. 
Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted 
by human dirigibility. It is the orderly peoples who 
create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above 
as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught 


398 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


to men. There are kings and tyrannies and im- 
perialisms, simply because of the unkingliness of men. 

And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, 
Benham cast off from his mind his last tolerance for 
earthly kings and existing States, and expounded to 
another human being for the first time this long- 
cherished doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is 
the lord of human destiny, the spirit of nobility, who 
will one day take the sceptre and rule the earth. . . . 
To the young American’s naive American response 
to any simply felt emotion, he seemed with his 
white earnestness and his glowing eyes a veritable 
prophet. . . . 

“This is the root idea of aristocracy,” said Benham. 

“I have never heard the underlying spirit of 
democracy, the real true Thing in democracy, so 
thoroughly expressed,” said the young American. 

§5 

Benham’s notes on race and racial cultures gave 
White tantalizing glimpses of a number of picturesque 
experiences. The adventure in Kieff had first roused 
Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was 
caught in the wheels of a pogrom. 

“Before that time I had been disposed to minimize 
and deny race. I still think it need not prevent men 
from the completest social co-operation, but I see 
now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to 
purge from his mind the idea that he is not primarily 
a Jew, a Teuton, or a Kelt, but a man. You can 
persuade any one in five minutes that he or she 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 399 


belongs to some special and blessed and privileged 
sort of human being ; it takes a lifetime to destroy 
that persuasion. There are these confounded differ- 
ences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair, small 
differences in themselves except that they give a 
foothold and foundation for tremendous fortifica- 
tions of prejudice and tradition, in which hostilities 
and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew’s 
nose, a Chinaman’s eyes or a negro’s colour I am 
reminded of that fatal little pit which nature has left 
in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in itself 
and of no significance, but a gathering-place for 
mischief. The extremest case of race-feeling is the 
Jewish case, and even here, I am convinced, it is 
the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those 
inevitable professional champions who live upon 
racial feeling, far more than their common distinc- 
tion of blood, which holds this people together banded 
against mankind.” 

Between the lines of such general propositions as 
this White read little scraps of intimation that linked 
with the things Benham let fall in Johannesburg to 
reconstruct the Kieff adventure. 

Benham had been visiting a friend in the country 
on the further side of the Dnieper. As they drove 
back along dusty stretches of road amidst fields of 
corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, 
they saw against the evening blue under the full 
moon a smoky red glare rising from amidst the white 
houses and dark trees of the town. “The pogrom’s 
begun,” said Benham’s friend, and was surprised 


400 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


when Benham wanted to end a pleasant day by 
going to see what happens after the beginning of a 
pogrom. 

He was to have several surprises before at last 
he left Benham in disgust and went home by him- 
self. 

For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his 
exalted theories, passed rapidly from an attitude of 
impartial enquiry to active intervention. The two 
men left their carriage and plunged into the network 
of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders 
harboured. . . . Benham’s first intervention was on 
behalf of a crouching and yelping bundle of humanity 
that was being dragged about and kicked at a street 
corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little 
old man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, 
while Benham remonstrated with the kickers. 
Benham’s tallness, his very Gentile face, his good 
clothes, and an air of tense authority about him 
had its effect, and the kickers shuffled off with 
remarks that were partly apologies. But Ben- 
ham’s friend revolted. This was no business of 
theirs. 

Benham went on unaccompanied towards the 
glare of the burning houses. 

For a time he watched. Black figures moved be- 
tween him and the glare, and he tried to find out the 
exact nature of the conflict by enquiries in clumsy 
Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a 
religious procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, 
that the shop of a cheating Jew trader had been set 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 401 


on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the adjacent 
group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were 
running out of the burning block on the other side 
“like rats.” The crowd was mostly composed of 
town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They 
were mischievous but undecided. Among them 
were a number of soldiers, and he was surprised to 
see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot, 
watching the looting of a shop that was still un- 
touched by the flames. 

He held back some men who had discovered a 
couple of women’s figures slinking along in the 
shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances 
the Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder 
was growing upon him. . . . 

Late that night Benham found himself the leading 
figure amidst a party of Jews who had made a counter 
attack upon a gang of roughs in a court that had 
become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of 
the young Jewish men had already been making a 
fight, rather a poor and hopeless fight, from the 
windows of the house near the entrance of the court, 
but it is doubtful if they would have made an effec- 
tive resistance if it had not been for this tall excited 
stranger who was suddenly shouting directions to 
them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was 
not that he brought powerful blows or subtle strategy 
to their assistance, but that he put heart into them 
and perplexity into his adversaries because he was 
so manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever 
have mistaken Benham for a Jew. When at last 


402 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


towards dawn a not too zealous governor called out 
the troops and began to clear the streets of rioters, 
Benham and a band of Jews were still keeping the 
gateway of that court behind a hasty but adequate 
barricade of furniture and handbarrows. 

The ghetto could not understand him, nobody 
could understand him, but it was clear a rare and 
precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he was 
implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very 
intelligent-looking old men to stay with them and 
preserve them until their safety was assured. 

They could not understand him, but they did their 
utmost to entertain him and assure him of their 
gratitude. They seemed to consider him as a repre- 
sentative of the British Government, and foreign 
intervention on their behalf is one of those unfor- 
tunate fixed ideas that no persecuted Jews seem able 
to abandon. 

Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, 
sitting beside a wood fire in an inner chamber richly 
flavoured by humanity and listening to a discourse in 
evil but understandable German. It was a discourse 
upon the wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish 
people — and it was delivered by a compact middle- 
aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but 
animated eyes. Beside him a very old man dozed 
and nodded approval. A number of other men 
crowded the apartment, including several who had 
helped to hold off the rioters from the court. Some 
could follow the talk and ever again endorsed the 
speaker in Yiddish or Russian ; others listened with 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 403 


tantalized expressions, their brows knit, their lips 
moving. 

It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For 
now he was at the very heart of the Jewish question, 
and he could get some light upon the mystery of this 
great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear 
tales of outrages, of such things he knew, but he 
wanted to understand what was the irritation that 
caused these things. 

So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the 
harmlessness and usefulness of the Jews. 

“But do you never take a certain advantage?” 
Benham threw out. 

“The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must 
we suffer for that?” 

The spokesman went on to the more positive 
virtues of his race. Benham suddenly had that 
uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill 
being made against him. Did the world owe Israel 
nothing for Philo, Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, 
Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, 
Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to 
Lord Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? 
Can France repudiate her debt to Fould, Gaudahaux, 
Oppert, or Germany to Flirst, Steinschneider, Herx- 
heimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and 
Benfey? . . . 

Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent 
tones and gestures that these names did undoubtedly 
include the cream of humanity, but was it not true 
that the Jews did press a little financially upon the 


404 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


inferior peoples whose lands they honoured in their 
exile? 

The man with the black beard took up the chal- 
lenge bravely. 

“ They are merciful creditors,” he said. “ And it is 
their genius to possess and control. What better 
stewards could you find for the wealth of nations than 
the Jews ? And for the honours ? That always had 
been the role of the Jews — stewardship. Since the 
days of Joseph in Egypt. . . .” 

Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the 
deficiencies of the Gentile population. Fie wished to 
be just and generous but the truth was the truth. 
The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness ; 
they had no sense of property ; were it not for unjust 
laws even now the Jews would possess all the land of 
South Russia. . . . 

Benham listened with a kind of fascination. 
“But,” he said. 

It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a 
protest or so from the onlookers, the Jewish apologist 
suddenly rose up, opened a safe close beside the fire 
and produced an armful of documents. 

“Look !” he said, “all over South Russia there are 
these !” 

Benham was a little slow to understand, until half 
a dozen of these papers had been thrust into his hand. 
Eager fingers pointed, and several voices spoke. 
These things were illegalities that might some day be 
legal; there were the records of loans and hidden 
transactions that might at any time put all the sur- 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 405 


rounding soil into the hands of the Jew. All South 
Russia was mortgaged. . . . 

“But is it so?” asked Benham, and for a time 
ceased to listen and stared into the fire. 

Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure 
silence and, feeling his way in unaccustomed German, 
began to speak and continued to speak in spite of a 
constant insurgent undertone of interruption from 
the Jewish spokesman. 

All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they 
not remember Nathan the Wise? 

“I did not claim him,” said the spokesman, misun- 
derstanding. “He is a character in fiction.” 

But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. 
They had to be merciful to one another and give their 
gifts freely to one another. Also they had to consider 
each other’s weaknesses. The Jews were probably 
justified in securing and administering the property 
of every community into which they came, they 
were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for 
that task, but also they had to consider, perhaps 
more than they did, the feelings and vanities of the 
host population into which they brought these 
beneficent activities. What was said of the igno- 
rance, incapacity and vice of the Roumanians and 
Russians was very generally believed and accepted, 
but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all 
his incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own 
patch and hovel and did have a curious irrational 
hatred of debt. . . . 

The faces about Benham looked perplexed. 


406 


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“ This, 7 ’ said Benham, tapping the papers in his 
hand. “They will not understand the ultimate 
benefit of it. It will be a source of anger and fresh 
hostility. It does not follow because your race 
has supreme financial genius that you must always 
follow its dictates to the exclusion of other considera- 
tions. . . .” 

The perplexity increased. 

Benham felt he must be more general. He went 
on to emphasize the brotherhood of man, the right 
to equal opportunity, equal privilege, freedom to 
develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, un- 
hindered by the idiosyncrasies of others. He could 
feel the sympathy and understanding of his hearers 
returning. “You see,” said Benham, “you must 
have generosity. You must forget ancient scores. 
Do you not see the world must make a fresh begin- 
ning?” 

He was entirely convinced he had them with him. 
The heads nodded assent, the bright eyes and lips 
followed the slow disentanglement of his bad German. 

“Free yourselves and the world,” he said. 

Applause. 

“And so,” he said breaking unconsciously into 
English, “let us begin by burning these beastly 
mortgages !” 

And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham 
cast his handful on the fire. The assenting faces 
became masks of horror. A score of hands clutched 
at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and 
anger filled the room. Some one caught at his 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 407 


throat from behind. “ Don't kill him!” cried some 
one. “He fought for us !” 

§6 

An hour later Benham returned in an extraordina- 
rily dishevelled and battered condition to his hotel. 
He found his friend in anxious consultation with 
the hotel proprietor. 

“We were afraid that something had happened to 
you,” said his friend. 

“I got a little involved,” said Benham. 

“Hasn’t some one clawed your cheek?” 

“Very probably,” said Benham. 

“And torn your coat ? And hit you rather heavily 
upon the neck?” 

“It was a complicated misunderstanding,” said 
Benham. “Oh ! pardon ! I’m rather badly bruised 
upon that arm you’re holding.” 

§7 

Benham told the story to White as a jest against 
himself. 

“I see now of course that they could not possibly 
understand my point of view,” he said. . . . 

“I’m not sure if they quite followed my Ger- 
man. . . . 

“It’s odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let’s burn 
these mortgages,’ and at the time I’m almost sure I 
didn’t know the German for mortgage. ...” 

It was not the only occasion on which other people 
had failed to grasp the full intention behind Benham ’s 


408 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


proceedings. His aristocratic impulses were apt to 
run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and 
time after time it was only too manifest to White 
that Benham ’s pallid flash of anger had astonished 
the subjects of his disinterested observations ex- 
tremely. His explorations in Hayti had been ter- 
minated abruptly by an affair with a native police- 
man that had necessitated the intervention of the 
British Consul. It was begun with that suddenness 
that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his 
hitting the policeman. It was in the main street of 
Cap Haytien, and the policeman had just clubbed an 
unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily 
loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument 
of Haytien discipline. His blow was a repartee, part 
of a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble, 
mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up 
in a blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, 
but it seemed to Benham an entirely unjustifiable 
blow. 

He allowed an indignation with negro policemen 
in general that had been gathering from the very 
moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry him 
away. He advanced with the kind of shout one 
would hurl at a dog, and smote the policeman to the 
earth with the stout stick that the peculiar social 
atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. 
By the local standard his blow was probably a 
trivial one, but the moral effect of his indignant 
pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him on 
these occasions was always very considerable. Un- 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 409 


happily these characteristics could have no effect 
on a second negro policeman who was approaching 
the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a 
blow on the shoulder that was meant for the head, 
and with the assistance of his colleague overpowered 
him, while the youth and the woman vanished. 

The two officials dragged Benham in a state of 
vehement protest to the lock-up, and only there, 
in the light of a superior officer’s superior knowl- 
edge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of 
his British citizenship. 

The memory of the destruction of the Haytien 
fleet by a German gunboat was still vivid in Port- 
au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in spite 
of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had 
knocked over, he was after two days of anger, two 
days of extreme insanitary experience, and much 
meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, re- 
leased. 

Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred 
sort diversified his enquiries into Indian conditions. 
They too turned for the most part on his facile 
exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire 
for human brotherhood. At last indeed came 
an affair that refused ultimately to remain trivial, 
and tangled him up in a coil that invoked news- 
paper articles and heated controversies. 

The effect of India upon Benham’s mind was a 
peculiar mixture of attraction and irritation. He 
was attracted by the Hindu spirit of intellectualism 
and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was 


410 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great 
world of India into a thousand futile little worlds, 
all aloof and hostile one to the other. “I came to 
see India,” he wrote, “and there is no India. There 
is a great number of Indias, and each goes about 
with its chin in the air, quietly scorning everybody 
else.” 

His Indian adventures and his great public con- 
troversy on caste began with a tremendous row with 
an Indian civil servant who had turned an Indian 
gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and 
culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting 
brown holiness at Benares, who had thrown aside 
his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham’s 
shadow had fallen upon it. 

“You unendurable snob !” said Benham, and then 
lapsing into the forceful and inadvisable: “By 
Heaven, you shall eat it ! . . 

§ 8 

Benham’s detestation of human divisions and 
hostilities was so deep in his character as to seem 
almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear 
reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks 
in human continuity in his sense of the gathering 
dangers they now involve. They had always, he 
was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and 
the destruction of human dignity, but the new con- 
ditions of life that have been brought about by 
modern science were making them far more danger- 
ous than they had ever been before. He believed 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 411 


that the evil and horror of war was becoming more 
and more tremendous with every decade, and that 
the free play of national prejudice and that stupid 
filching ambitiousness that seems to be inseparable 
from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catas- 
trophe, unless a real international aristocracy could 
be brought into being to prevent it. 

In the drawer full of papers labelled “Politics,” 
White found a paper called “The Metal Beast.” It 
showed that for a time Benham had been greatly 
obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were 
in those days piling up in every country in Europe. 
He had gone to Essen, and at Essen he had met a 
German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great 
guns that were presently to smash the effete British 
fleet and open the Imperial way to London. 

“I could not sleep,” he wrote, “on account of this 
man and his talk and the streak of hatred in his talk. 
He distressed me not because he seemed exceptional, 
but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he 
was more human than I was, and that only killing 
and killing could come out of such humanity. I 
thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the 
still greater guns he had talked about, and how 
gloatingly he thought of the destruction they could 
do. I felt as I used to feel about that infernal stallion 
that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a 
despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And 
this creature who had so disturbed me was only a 
beastly snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, 
who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the 


412 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto 
and breathed into my face as he talked to me. The 
commonest of representative men. I went about 
that Westphalian country after that, with the con- 
viction that headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal 
monsters were breeding all about me. I felt that 
science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of 
black dragons. They were crouching here and 
away there in France and England, they were 
crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed up 
in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins 
as hawks are hooded. . . . And I had never thought 
very much about them before, and there they were, 
waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated 
thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a 
million, saw fit to call them out to action. Just 
out of hatred and nationalism and faction. . . 

Then came a queer fancy. 

“ Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty- 
apparatus ; I see it more and more as the gathering 
revenge of dead joyless matter for the happiness of 
life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous 
plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is 
why in particular half-living people seem to love 
these things. La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind 
of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the 
tyranny of the strong man over men. Essen comes, 
the new thing, the tyranny of the strong ma- 
chine. . . . 

“ Science is either slave or master. These 
people — I mean the German people and militarist 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 413 


people generally — have no real mastery over the 
scientific and economic forces on which they seem 
to ride. The monster of steel and iron carries 
Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It 
has persuaded them to mount upon its back and 
now they must follow the logic of its path. 
Whither? . . . Only kingship will ever master 
that beast of steel which has got loose into the 
world. Nothing but the sense of unconquerable 
kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it. . . . 
Men must be kingly aristocrats — it isn’t may be 
now, it is must be — or, these confederated metals, 
these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these 
explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood 
and life out of our race into mere red-streaked froth 
and filth. 

Then he turned to the question of this metallic 
beast’s release. Would it ever be given blood? 

“Men of my generation have been brought up in 
this threat of a great war that never comes; for 
forty years we have had it, so that it is with a note of 
incredulity that one tells oneself, “After all this war 
may happen. But can it happen?” 

He proceeded to speculate upon the probability 
whether a great war would ever devastate western 
Europe again, and it was very evident to White that 
he wanted very much to persuade himself against 
that idea. It was too disagreeable for him to think 
it probable. The paper was dated 1910. It was 
in October, 1914, that White, who was still working 
upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham’s 


414 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


life and thought he has recently published, read 
what Benham had written. Benham concluded 
that the common-sense of the world would hold up 
this danger until reason could get “to the head of 
things.” 

“There are already mighty forces in Germany/’ 
Benham wrote, “that will struggle very powerfully 
to avoid a war. And these forces increase. Behind 
the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama 
and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a 
great and noble people. ... I have talked with 
Germans of the better kind. ... You cannot 
have a whole nation of Christophes. . . . There 
also the true knighthood discovers itself. ... I do 
not believe this war will overtake us.” 

“Well!” said White. 

“I must go back to Germany and understand 
Germany better,” the notes went on. 

But other things were to hold Benham back from 
that resolve. Other things were to hold many men 
back from similar resolves until it was too late for 
them. . . . 

“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers 
should lower over Europe, because a certain threaten- 
ing vanity has crept into the blood of a people, be- 
cause a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled. 
. . . Does no one see what that metallic beast will 
do if they once let it loose ? It will trample cities ; 
it will devour nations. ...” 

White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. 
One crumpled evening paper at his feet proclaimed 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 415 


in otartled headlines: “Rain of Incendiary Shells. 
Antwerp Ablaze.” Another declared untruthfully 
but impressively: “Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over 
the Doomed City.” 

He had bought all the evening papers, and had 
read and re-read them and turned up maps and 
worried over strategic problems for which he had no 
data at all — as every one did at that time — before 
he was able to go on with Benham’s manuscripts. 

These pacific reassurances seemed to White’s war- 
troubled mind like finding a flattened and faded 
flower, a girl’s love token, between the pages of some 
torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked 
out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had 
had their fill. . . . 

“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, 
and sat for a long time staring gloomily into the fire, 
forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that men who 
are tired and weary die, and that new men are born 
to succeed them. . . . 

“We have to begin over again,” said White at 
last, and took up Benham’s papers where he had 
laid them down. . . . 


§ 9 

One considerable section of Benham’s treatment 
of the Fourth Limitation was devoted to what he 
called the Prejudices of Social Position. This 
section alone was manifestly expanding into a large 
treatise upon the psychology of economic organiza- 
tion. . . . 


416 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


It was only very slowly that he had come to realize 
the important part played by economic and class 
hostilities in the disordering of human affairs. This 
was a very natural result of his peculiar social 
circumstances. Most people born to wealth and 
ease take the established industrial system as the 
natural method in human affairs; it is only very 
reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and dis- 
interestedness that they can be brought to realize 
that it is natural only in the sense that it has grown 
up and come about, and necessary only because 
nobody is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. 
Their experience of it is a satisfactory experience. 
On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider 
is one’s outlook and the more alert one is to see the 
risks and dangers of international dissensions. 
Travel and talk to foreigners open one’s eyes to 
aggressive possibilities ; history and its warnings 
become conceivable. It is in the nature of things 
that socialists and labour parties should minimize 
international obligations and necessities, and equally 
so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutoc- 
racies should be negligent of and impatient about 
social reform. 

But Benham did come to realize this broader 
conflict between worker and director, between poor 
man and possessor, between resentful humanity and 
enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned 
opportunity. It is a far profounder and subtler 
conflict than any other in human affairs. “I can 
foresee a time,” he wrote, “ when the greater national 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 417 


and racial hatreds may all be so weakened as to be 
no longer a considerable source of human limitation 
and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and 
language and social habit are allayed, and when the 
element of hatred and aggression may be clean 
washed out of most religious cults, but I do not 
begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine 
a method, when there will not be great friction 
between those who employ, those who direct collec- 
tive action, and those whose part it is to be the 
rank and file in industrialism. This, I know, is a 
limitation upon my confidence due very largely to 
the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort 
of organization. Very probably resentment and 
suspicion in the mass and self-seeking and dishonesty 
in the fortunate few are not so deeply seated, so 
necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be 
cheerfully obedient and modestly directive in war 
time, there is no reason why ultimately they should 
not be so in the business of peace. But I do not 
understand the elements of the methods by which 
this state of affairs can be brought about. 

“If I were to confess this much to an intelligent 
working man I know that at once he would answer 
‘ Socialism/ but Socialism is no more a solution of 
this problem than eating is a solution when one is 
lost in the wilderness and hungry. Of course 
everybody with any intelligence wants Socialism, 
everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human 
efforts directed to the common good and a common 
end, but brought face to face with practical nrob- 
2b 


418 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


lems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency of 
practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism 
would not work, but I do say that so far Socialists 
have failed to convince me that they could work it. 
The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy 
proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited 
output and no other human advantage whatever. 
Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, in- 
spiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not 
very helpful, towards the vast problem of moral 
and material adjustment before the race. That 
problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate, 
and only by great multitudes of generous workers, 
one working at this point and one at that, secretly 
devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed 
kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his 
right to count himself among those who do these 
kingly services, is this elaborate Tightening of work 
and guidance to be done.” 

So from these most fundamental social difficulties 
he came back to his panacea. All paths and all 
enquiries led him back to his conception of aristoc- 
racy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-ex- 
amining yet secret, making no personal nor class 
pretences, as the supreme need not only of the 
individual but the world. 


§10 

It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal 
which had brought the two schoolfellows together 
again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 419 

An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had 
driven him to seek consolations in strange scenery 
and mysterious desolations. It was as if Zimbabwe 
called to him. Benham had come to South Africa 
to see into the question of Indian immigration, and 
he was now on his way to meet Amanda in London. 
Neither man had given much heed to the gathering 
social conflict on the Rand until the storm burst 
about them. There had been a few paragraphs in 
the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour 
etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade 
Union officials, a thing that impressed them both as 
technical, and then suddenly a long incubated 
quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burn- 
ing of houses and furniture, attacks on mines, 
attempts to dynamite trains. White stayed in 
Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded 
up country by the railway strike that was among the 
possibilities of the situation. Benham stayed be- 
cause he was going to London very reluctantly, and 
he was glad of this justification for a few days’ delay. 
The two men found themselves occupying adjacent 
tables in the Sherborough Hotel, and WLite was 
the first to recognize the other. They came together 
with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither 
would have displayed in London. 

White had not seen Benham since the social days 
of Amanda at Lancaster Gate, and he was astonished 
at the change a few years had made in him. The 
peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had 
become more marked, his skin was deader, his 


420 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


features seemed more prominent and his expression 
intenser. His eyes were very bright and more 
sunken under his brows. He had suffered from j 
yellow fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed 
were the marks left by that illness. And he was 
much more detached from the people about him; 
less attentive to the small incidents of life, more 
occupied with inner things. He greeted White 
with a confidence that White was one day to re- 
member as pathetic. 

“It is good to meet an old friend/’ Benham said. 
“I have lost friends. And I do not make fresh 
ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do 
not follow the same tracks that other people are 
following. ...” 

What track was he following? It was now that 
White first heard of the Research Magnificent. He 
wanted to know what Benham was doing, and Ben- 
ham after some partial and unsatisfactory explana- 
tion of his interest in insurgent Hindoos, embarked 
upon larger expositions. “It is, of course, a part of 
something else,” he amplified. He was writing a 
book, “an enormous sort of book.” He laughed 
with a touch of shyness. It was about “every- 
thing,” about how to live and how not to live. 
And “aristocracy, and all sorts of things.” White 
was always curious about other people’s books. 
Benham became earnest and more explicit under 
encouragement, and to talk about his book was 
soon to talk about himself. In various ways, in- 
tentionally and inadvertently, he told White much. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 421 


These chance encounters, these intimacies of the 
train and hotel, will lead men at times to a stark 
frankness of statement they would never permit 
themselves with habitual friends. 

About the Johannesburg labour trouble they 
talked very little, considering how insistent it was 
becoming. But the wide propositions of the Re- 
search Magnificent, with its large indifference to 
immediate occurrences, its vast patience, its tre- 
mendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in 
White’s memory with the bitterness, narrowness 
and resentment of the events about them. For him 
the thought of that first discussion of this vast in- 
choate book into which Benham’s life was flowering, 
and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed 
with it a fringe of vivid little pictures ; pictures of 
crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a 
lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of 
disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, 
of the muffled galloping of troops through the 
broad dusty street in the night, of groups of men 
standing and watching down straight broad roads, 
roads that ended in groups of chimneys and squat 
buildings of corrugated iron. And once there was 
a marching body of white men in the foreground 
and a complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass 
of Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking 
eagerly amongst themselves. 

“All this affair here is little more than a hitch in 
the machinery,” said Benham, and went back to 
his large preoccupation. . . . 


422 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


But White, who had not seen so much human 
disorder as Benham, felt that it was more than that. 
Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that eventful 
background while Benham talked to him. 

When the firearms went off he may for the moment 
have even given the background the greater share of 
his attention. . . . 


§11 

It was only as White burrowed through his legacy 
of documents that the full values came to very many 
things that Benham said during these last conversa- 
tions. The papers fitted in with his memories of 
their long talks like text with commentary; so much of 
Benham’s talk had repeated the private writings in 
which he had first digested his ideas that it was 
presently almost impossible to disentangle what had 
been said and understood at Johannesburg from the 
fuller statement of those patched and corrected 
manuscripts. The two things merged in White’s 
mind as he read. The written text took upon itself 
a resonance of Benham’s voice; it eked out the 
hints and broken sentences of his remembered con- 
versation. 

But some things that Benham did not talk about 
at all, left by their mere marked absence an impres- 
sion on White’s mind. And occasionally after 
Benham had been talking for a long time there 
would be an occasional aphasia, such as is often 
apparent in the speech of men who restrain them- 
selves from betraying a preoccupation. He would 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 423 


say nothing about Amanda or about women in 
general, he was reluctant to speak of Prothero, 
and another peculiarity was that he referred 
perhaps half a dozen times or more to the 
idea that he was a “prig.” He seemed to be de- 
fending himself against some inner accusation, some 
unconquerable doubt of the entire adventure of his 
life. These half hints and hints by omission exer- 
cised the quick intuitions of White’s mind very keen- 
ly, and he drew far closer to an understanding of Ben- 
ham’s reserves than Benham ever suspected. . . . 

At first after his parting from Amanda in London 
Benham had felt completely justified in his treat- 
ment of her. She had betrayed him and he had 
behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He 
had no doubt that he had punished her very effect- 
ively, and it was only after he had been travel- 
ling in China with Prothero for some time and 
in the light of one or two chance phrases in her 
letters that he began to have doubts whether he 
ought to have punished her at all. And one night 
at Shanghai he had a dream in which she stood 
before him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda, 
very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was 
dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he 
had gone away from her. Afterwards the dream 
became absurd : she showed him the black leopard’s 
fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth- 
eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had been 
so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and 
he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long 


424 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


time he was full of unspoken answers explaining 
that in view of her deliberate unfaithfulness the 
position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt 
her own fur. But what was more penetrating and 
distressing in this dream was not so much the case 
Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable 
intimacy between them, as though they still belonged 
to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that 
had happened afterwards could have destroyed their 
common responsibility and the common interest of 
their first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of 
course he was hurt. He began to see that his mar- 
riage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a 
technical bond. 

And having perceived that much he presently 
began to doubt whether she realized anything of the 
sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone, but 
at times they were as detached and guarded as a 
schoolgirl writing to a cousin. Then it seemed to 
Benham an extraordinary fraud on her part that she 
should presume to come into his dream with an en- 
tirely deceptive closeness and confidence. She began 
to sound him in these latter letters upon the possibil- 
ity of divorce. This, which he had been quite dis- 
posed to concede in London, now struck him as an 
outrageous suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, 
and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it 
was “better.” But, again, why better? It is re- 
markable that although his mind had habituated 
itself to the idea that Easton was her lover in Lon- 
don, her thought of being divorced, no doubt to 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 425 


marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She 
asked him to take the blame in the divorce pro- 
ceedings. There, again, he found himself un- 
generous. He did not want to do that. Why 
should he do that? As a matter of fact he was by 
no means reconciled to the price he had paid for his 
Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda 
acutely. He was regretting her with a regret that 
grew when by all the rules of life it ought to be 
diminishing. 

It was in consequence of that regret and his con- 
troversies with Prothero while they travelled to- 
gether in China that his concern about what he 
called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one 
may suppose has a little afflicted every reasonably 
self-conscious man who has turned from the natural 
passionate personal life to religion or to public 
service or any abstract devotion. These things 
that are at least more extensive than the interests 
of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming un- 
substantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly 
upon the imagination, they capture one and isolate 
one and then they vanish out of sight. It is far 
easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover than 
it is to be faithful to a cause or to one’s country 
or to a religion. In the glow of one’s first service that 
larger idea may be as closely spontaneous as a hand- 
clasp, but in the darkness that comes as the glow 
dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality. It 
was in such dark moments that Benham was most 
persecuted by his memories of Amanda and most 


426 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


distressed by this suspicion that the Research 
Magnificent was a priggishness, a pretentious lo- 
gomachy. Prothero could indeed hint as much so 
skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed 
an insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter 
of children, to the good light in wine and all the 
warm happiness of existence. And then Amianda 
would peep out of the dusk and whisper, “Of course 
if you could leave me — ! Was I not life t Even 
now if you cared to come back to me — For I 
loved you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long 
after you had left me to follow your dreams. . . . 
Even now I am drifting further into lies and the 
last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, 
and shameful leopard I am now, who was once clean 
and bright. ... You could come back, Cheetah, 
and you could save me yet. If you would love 
me. . . .” 

In certain moods she could wring his heart by such 
imagined speeches, the very quality of her voice 
was in them, a softness that his ear had loved, and 
not only could she distress him, but when Benham 
was in this heartache mood, when once she had set 
him going, then his little mother also would rise 
against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue 
eyes bright with tears ; and his frowsty father would 
back towards him and sit down complaining that he 
was neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale 
would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking 
after him as he slunk away from her through Ken- 
sington Gardens; indeed every personal link he 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 427 


had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him 
back through the door of self-reproach Amanda 
opened and set him aching and accusing himself of 
harshness and self-concentration. The very kit- 
tens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of 
long -repented hardness. For a year before Proth- 
ero was killed there were these heartaches. That 
tragedy gave them their crowning justification. 
All these people said in this form or that, “You 
owed a debt to us, you evaded it, you betrayed us, 
you owed us life out of yourself, love and services, 
and you have gone off from us all with this life that 
was ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the 
rule of the world, and with empty phantoms of power 
and destiny. All this was intellectualization. You 
sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind. There 
is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like 
you may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a 
fortuitous result of incalculably multitudinous forces. 
But all of us you could have made happier. You 
could have spared us distresses. Prothero died 
because of you. Presently it will be the turn of your 
father, your mother — Amanda perhaps. ...” 

He made no written note of his heartaches, but he 
made several memoranda about priggishness that 
White read and came near to understanding. In 
spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was 
making up his mind to be a prig. He weighed the 
cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness against 
his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his 
obstinate sympathy for Prothero’s grossness and 


428 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


his mother’s personal pride, and he made his choice. 
But it was a reluctant choice. 

One fragment began in the air. “Of course I had 
made myself responsible for her life. But it was, 
you see, such a confoundedly energetic life, as vigor- 
ous and as slippery as an eel. . . . Only by giving 
all my strength to her could I have held Amanda. 
... So what was the good of trying to hold 
Amanda? . . . 

“All one’s people have this sort of claim upon one. 
Claims made by their pride and their self-respect, and 
their weaknesses and dependences. You’ve no right 
to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom 
when it means snapping and tearing the silly suffer- 
ing tendrils they have wrapped about you. The 
true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp, 
enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every 
human being and still do the work that ought to be 
his essential life. I see that now. It’s one of the 
things this last year or so of loneliness has made me 
realize ; that in so far as I have set out to live the 
aristocratic life I have failed. Instead I’ve dis- 
covered it — and found myself out. I’m an over- 
strung man. I go harshly and continuously for 
one idea. I live as I ride. I blunder through my 
fences, I take off too soon. I’ve no natural ease of 
mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep 
hold of a thing too big for me and do a thing beyond 
my ability. Only after Prothero’s death was it 
possible for me to realize the prig I have always 
been, first as regards him and then as regards 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 429 


Amanda and my mother and every one. A neces- 
sary unavoidable priggishness. . . . 

“I do not see how certain things can be done with- 
out prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and 
specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so 
resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced. . . . 
All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no 
assurance about pioneers. . . . 

“Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some 
one has to explain aristocracy. . . . But the very 
essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it, is that it does 
not explain nor talk about itself. . . . 

“After all it doesn’t matter what I am. . . . It’s 
just a private vexation that I haven’t got where I 
meant to get. That does not affect the truth I 
have to tell. . . . 

“If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a 
prig, still one must speak the truth. I have worked 
out some very considerable things in my research, 
and the time has come when I must set them out 
clearly and plainly. That is my job anyhow. My 
journey to London to release Amanda will be just 
the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my 
real life. It will release me from my last entangle- 
ment with the fellow creatures I have always failed 
to make happy. . . . It’s a detail in the work. 

. . . And I shall go on. 

“But I shall feel very like a man who goes back 
for a surgical operation. 

“It’s very like that. A surgical operation, and 
when it is over perhaps I shall think no more about it. 


430 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“And beyond these things there are great masses 
of work to be done. So far I have but cleared up for 
myself a project and outline of living. I must begin 
upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon 
the details, and, presently, I shall see more clearly 
where other men are working to the same ends. . . 

§12 

Benham’ s expedition to China with Prothero was 
essentially a wrestle between his high resolve to 
work out his conception of the noble life to the 
utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection 
and sympathy for the earthliness of that inglorious 
little don. Although Benham insisted upon the 
dominance of life by noble imaginations and relent- 
less reasonableness, he would never altogether 
abandon the materialism of life. Prothero had 
once said to him, “You are the advocate of the 
brain and I of the belly. Only, only we respect 
each other.” And at another time, “You fear 
emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. 
You do not drink gin because you think it would 
make you weep. But if I could not weep in any 
other way I would drink gin.” And it was under 
the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from 
the haughty intellectualism, the systematized supe- 
riorities and refinements, the caste marks and de- 
fensive dignities of India to China, that great teem- 
ing stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity. 

Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout 
of elevated idealism. It was only very slowly that 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 431 


he reconciled his mind to the idea of an entirely 
solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For 
some time as he went about the world he was trying 
to bring himself into relationship with the advanced 
thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to 
promise at least a mental and moral co-operation. 
Yet it is difficult to see what co-operation was 
possible unless it was some sort of agreement that 
presently they should all shout together. And it 
was after a certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, 
whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of perfect 
manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled 
from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the 
most undignified fellow of Trinity. And as an advo- 
cate and exponent of the richness of the lower levels 
of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of 
the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went 
with Benham by way of Siberia to the Chinese 
scene. 

Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner- 
table in their choice of food and drink. Benham was 
always wary and Prothero always appreciative. It 
peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the 
direction of their glances; Whenever women walked 
about, Prothero gave way to a sort of ethnological 
excitement. “That girl — a wonderful racial type.” 
But in Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on 
going again to the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he 
had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished 
and left no trace he prowled the streets until the 
small hours. 


432 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


In the eastward train he talked intermittently of 
her. “I should have defied Cambridge,” he said. 

But at every stopping station he got out upon the 
platform ethnologically alert 

Theoretically Benham was disgusted with 
Prothero. Really he was not disgusted at all. 
There was something about Prothero like a sparrow, 
like a starling, like a Scotch terrier. . . . These, 
too, are morally objectionable creatures that do not 
disgust. . . . 

Prothero discoursed much upon the essential 
goodness of Russians. He said they were a people 
of genius, that they showed it in their faults and 
failures just as much as in their virtues and achieve- 
ments. He extolled the “ germinating disorder” of 
Moscow far above the “implacable discipline” of 
Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a 
base materialist people, could so maintain its atten- 
tion upon precision and cleanliness. Benham was 
roused to defence against this paradox. “But all 
exaltation neglects,” said Prothero. “No religion has 
ever boasted that its saints were spick and span.” 
This controversy raged between them in the streets 
of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked 
their way through the indescribable filth of Pekin. 

“You say that all this is a fine disdain for material 
things,” said Benham. “But look out there !” 

Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young 
women came shuffling along, cleaving the crowd in 
the narrow street by virtue of a single word and 
two brace of pails of human ordure. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 433 


“That is not a fine disdain for material things,” 
said Benham. “That is merely individualism and 
unsystematic living.” 

“A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is 
left to them now. The Manchus crippled them, 
spoilt their roads and broke their waterways. 
European intervention paralyses every attempt they 
make to establish order on their own lines. In the 
Ming days China did not reek. . . . And, anyhow, 
Benham, it’s better than the silly waste of Lon- 
don. . . .” 

And in a little while Prothero discovered that 
China had tried Benham and found him wanting, 
centuries and dynasties ago. 

What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he 
asked, but the ideal of Confucius, the superior 
person, “the son of the King” ? There you had the 
very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examina- 
tion, self-preparation under a vague Theocracy. 
(“Vaguer,” said Benham, “for the Confucian 
Heaven could punish and reward.”) Even the 
elaborate sham modesty of the two dreams was the 
same. Benham interrupted and protested with 
heat. And this Confucian idea of the son of the 
King, Prothero insisted, had been the cause of 
China’s paralysis. “My idea of nobility is not 
traditional but expectant,” said Benham. “After 
all, Confucianism has held together a great pacific 
state far longer than any other polity has ever 
lasted. I’ll accept your Confucianism. I’ve not 
the slightest objection to finding China nearer 
2f 


434 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


salvation than any other land. Do but turn it 
round so that it looks to the future and not to the 
past, and it will be the best social and political culture 
in the world. That, indeed, is what is happening. 
Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and 
you will have made a new lead for mankind.” 

From that Benham drove on to discoveries. 
“When a man thinks of the past he concentrates on 
self ; when he thinks of the future he radiates from 
self. Call me a neo-Confucian ; with the cone open- 
ing forward away from me, instead of focussing on 
me. . . .” 

“You make me think of an extinguisher,” said 
Prothero. 

“You know I am thinking of a focus,” said Ben- 
ham. “But all your thought now has become 
caricature. . . . You have stopped thinking. You 
are fighting after making up your mind. . . 

Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham’s 
prompt endorsement of his Chinese identification. 
He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried 
to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. 
All cultures must be judged by their reaction and 
fatigue products, and Confucianism had produced 
formalism, priggishness, humbug. ... No doubt 
its ideals had had their successes ; they had unified 
China, stamped the idea of universal peace and good 
manners upon the greatest mass of population in 
the world, paved the way for much beautiful art 
and literature and living. “But in the end, all 
your stern orderliness, Benham,” said Prothero, 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 435 


“only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against 
this everlasting armour on the soul. After Han 
came T’ang. Have you never read Ling Po ? 
There’s scraps of him in English in that little book 
you have — what is it ? — the Lute of Jade ? He was 
the inevitable Epicurean ; the Omar Khayyam after 
the Prophet. Life must relax at last. ...” 

“No!” cried Benham. “If it is traditional, I 
admit, yes; but if it is creative, no. . . .” 

Under the stimulation of their undying contro- 
versy Benham was driven to closer enquiries into 
Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to 
mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. “We 
still know nothing of China,” said Prothero. “Most 
of the stuff we have been told about this country 
is mere middle-class tourists’ twaddle. We send 
merchants from Brixton and missionaries from 
Glasgow, and what doesn’t remind them of these 
delectable standards seems either funny to them or 
wicked. I admit the thing is slightly pot-bound, 
so to speak, in the ancient characters and the an- 
cient traditions, but for all that, they know , they 
have , what all the rest of the world has still to find 
and get. When they begin to speak and write in a 
modern way and handle modern things and break 
into the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest 
of the world will find just how much it is behind. 

. . . Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not 
such fools as that, but life . . . .” 

Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions. 

He came to realize more and more clearly that 


436 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

while India dreams or wrestles weakly in its sleep, 
while Europe is still hopelessly and foolishly given 
over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious 
religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling 
with loaded guns, China, even more than America, 
develops steadily into a massive possibility of 
ordered and aristocratic liberalism. . . . 

The two men followed their associated and discon- 
nected paths. Through Benham’s chance speeches 
and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might 
catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that 
bilateral adventure. He saw Benham in con- 
versation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave- 
faced, bald-browed persons with disciplined move- 
ments, who sat with their hands thrust into their 
sleeves talking excellent English ; while Prothero 
pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite 
sort with gentlemen of a more confidential type. 
And, presently, Prothero began to discover and 
discuss the merits of opium. 

For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, 
if one is to find the solution of life’s problem in the 
rational enjoyment of one’s sensations, why should 
one not use opium? It is art materialized. It 
gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of 
exertion, and if presently its gifts diminish one 
need but increase the quantity. Moreover, it 
quickens the garrulous mind, and steadies the hap- 
piness of love. Across the varied adventures of 
Benham’s journey in China fell the shadow first 
of a suspicion and then of a certainty. . . . 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 437 


The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped 
about Prothero like some tainted but scented robe, 
and all too late Benham sought to drag him away. 
And then in a passion of disgust turned from him. 

“To this,” cried Benham, “one comes ! Save for 
pride and fierceness !” 

“Better this than cruelty,” said Prothero talking 
quickly and clearly because of the evil thing in his 
veins. “You think that you are the only explorer 
of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains 
I board the house-boat and float down the stream. 
For you the stars, for me the music and the lanterns. 
You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I am 
a Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force 
yourself beyond fear of pain, and I force myself 
beyond fear of consequences. What are we either 
of us but children groping under the black cloak of 
our Maker? — who will not blind us with his light. 
Did he not give us also these lusts, the keen knife 
and the sweetness, these sensations that are like 
pineapple smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives 
from heaven, like being flayed with delight. . . . 
And did he not give us dreams fantastic beyond any 
lust whatever? What is the good of talking? 
Speak to your own kind. I have gone, Benham. 
I am lost already. There is no resisting any more, 
since I have drugged away resistance. Why then 
should I come back? I know now the symphonies 
of the exalted nerves; I can judge; and I say 
better lie and hear them to the end than come back 
again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo, 


438 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


my — effort! My effort ! ... I ruin my body. 
I know. But what of that? ... I shall soon be 
thin and filthy. What of the grape-skin when one 
has had the pulp ?” 

“But,” said Benham, “the cleanness of life!” 

“While I perish,” said Prothero still more 
wickedly, “I say good things. . . .” 

§13 

White had a vision of a great city with narrow 
crowded streets, hung with lank banners and gay 
with vertical vermilion labels, and of a pleasant* 
large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, 
a garden set with artificial stones and with beasts 
and men and lanterns of white porcelain, a garden 
which overlooked this city. Here it was that 
Benham stayed and talked with his host, a man 
robed in marvellous silks and subtle of speech even 
in the European languages he used, and meanwhile 
Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wicked- 
ness of the town below. It was a very great town 
indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a 
huge river, a river that divided itself indolently 
into three shining branches so as to make islands of 
the central portion of the place. And on this river 
swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, 
boats in which people lived, boats in which they 
sought pleasure, moored places of assembly, high- 
pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo 
craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless 
miles of it, as no other part of the world save China 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 439 


can display. In the daylight it was gay with count- 
less sunlit colours embroidered upon a fabric of 
yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred 
thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were 
reflected quiveringly upon the black flowing waters. 

And while Benham sat and talked in the garden 
above came a messenger who was for some reason 
very vividly realized by White’s imagination. He 
was a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken 
cheeks that made his cheek bones very prominent, 
and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the 
geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of 
his yellow robe to hand Prothero’s message to Ben- 
ham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in White’s 
imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and 
the brown roofs and blue haze of the great town 
below, and was with one exception the distinctest 
thing in the story. The message he bore was 
scribbled by Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl : 
“Send a hundred dollars by this man. I am in a 
frightful fix.” 

Now Benham’s host had been twitting him with 
the European patronage of opium, and something in 
this message stirred his facile indignation. Twice 
before he had had similar demands. And on the 
whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable 
demands. He was astonished that while he was 
sitting and talking of the great world-republic of 
the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy 
that would make it possible, his own friend, his 
chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious 


440 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. 
He felt a wave of intense irritation. 

“No,” he said, “I will not.” 

And he was too angry to express himself in any 
language understandable by his messenger. 

His host intervened and explained after a few 
questions that the occasion was serious. Prothero, 
it seemed, had been gambling. 

“No,” said Benham. “He is shameless. Let 
him do what he can.” 

The messenger was still reluctant to go. 

And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized 
Benham. 

“Where is your friend?” asked the mandarin. 

“I don’t know,” said Benham. 

“But they will keep him! They may do all 
sorts of things when they find he is lying to them.” 

“Lying to them?” 

“About your help.” 

“Stop that man,” cried Benham suddenly realizing 
his mistake. But when the servants went to stop 
the messenger their intentions were misunderstood, 
and the man dashed through the open gate of the 
garden and made off down the winding road. 

“Stop him!” cried Benham, and started in pur- 
suit, suddenly afraid for Prothero. 

The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a 
small pebble sometimes starts an avalanche. . . . 

White pieced together his conception of the circles 
of disturbance that spread out from Benham’s pur- 
suit of Prothero’s flying messenger. 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 441 


For weeks and months the great town had been 
uneasy in all its ways because of the insurgent 
spirits from the south and the disorder from the 
north, because of endless rumours and incessant 
intrigue. The stupid manoeuvres of one European 
“power” against another, the tactlessness of mis- 
sionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet 
violence and force with violence and force, had 
fermented and brewed the possibility of an out- 
break. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at 
once to Prothero was like the firing of a mine. This 
tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible stranger charging 
through the narrow streets that led to the pleasure- 
boats in the south river seemed to many a blue- 
clad citizen like the White Peril embodied. Behind 
him came the attendants of the rich man up the 
hill; but they surely were traitors to help this 
stranger. 

Before Benham could at all realize what was 
happening he found his way to the river-boat on 
which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred 
by a vigorous street fight. Explanations were im- 
possible ; he joined in the fight. 

For three days that fight developed round the 
mystery of Prothero’s disappearance. 

It was a complicated struggle into which the local 
foreign traders on the river-front and a detachment 
of modern drilled troops from the up-river barracks 
were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was 
never clearly explained, and at the end of it they 
found Prothero’s body flung out upon a waste place 


442 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed while 
he was asleep. . . . 

And from the broken fragments of description that 
Benham let fall, White had an impression of him 
hunting for all those three days through the strange 
places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over 
queer Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces 
of empty warehouses, in the incense-scented dark- 
ness of temple yards, along planks that passed to 
the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats 
that slipped noiselessly among the larger craft, and 
sometimes he hunted alone, sometimes in company, 
sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness 
against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm 
of shining yellow faces screamed and shouted through 
the torn paper windows. . . . And then at the end 
of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kine- 
matograph film, one last picture jerked into place 
and stopped and stood still, a white wall in the sun- 
shine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty 
flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had 
for the first time an inexpressive face. . . . 

§14 

Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the 
Sherborough Hotel at Johannesburg and told of 
these things. White watched him from an arm- 
chair. And as he listened he noted again the inten- 
sification of Benham’s face, the darkness under his 
brows, the pallor of his skin, the touch of red in his 
eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Ben- 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 443 


ham’s eyes ; it shone when he looked out of a dark- 
ness into a light. And he sat forward with his 
arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand 
about over the things on the table. 

“ You see,” he said, “this is a sort of horror in my 
mind. Things like this stick in my mind. I am 
always seeing Prothero now, and it will take years 
to get this scar off my memory again. Once before 
— about a horse, I had the same kind of distress. 
And it makes me tender, sore-minded about every- 
thing. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it’s 
just like any other ache that lays hold of one. One 
can’t cure it. One has to get along with it. . . . 

“I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, 
but how was I to know then that it was so impera- 
tive to send that money? . . . 

“At the time it seemed just pandering to his 
vices. . . . 

“I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of 
hastiness altogether. It takes me by surprise. 
Before the messenger was out of sight I had re- 
pented. . . . 

“I failed him. I have gone about in the world 
dreaming of tremendous things and failing most 
people. My wife too. . . .” 

He stopped talking for a little time and folded his 
arms tight and stared hard in front of himself, his 
lips compressed. 

“You see, White,” he said, with a kind of setting 
of the teeth, “this is the sort of thing one has to 
stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be done 


444 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


perfectly. And on the whole — ” He spoke still 
more slowly, “I would go through again with the 
very same things that have hurt my people. If I 
had to live over again. I would try to do the things 
without hurting the people, but I would do the 
things anyhow. Because I'm raw with remorse, it 
does not follow that on the whole I am not doing 
right. Right doing isn’t balm. If I could have 
contrived not to hurt these people as I have done, 
it would have been better, just as it would be better 
to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I 
was clumsy with them and they suffered, I suffer for 
their suffering, but still I have to stick to the way I 
have taken. One’s blunders are accidents. If one 
thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn’t 
accident-proof. . . . 

But I wish I had sent those dollars to Proth- 
ero. . . . God! White, but I lie awake at night 
thinking of that messenger as he turned away. . . . 
Trying to stop him. . . . 

“I didn’t send those dollars. So fifty or sixty 
people were killed and many wounded. . . . There 
for all practical purposes the thing ends. Perhaps 
it will serve to give me a little charity for some 
other fool’s haste and blundering. . . . 

“I couldn’t help it, White. I couldn’t help 
it. . . . 

“The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes 
on. One thinks, one learns, one adds one’s con- 
tribution of experience and understanding. The 
spirit of the race goes on to light and comprehen- 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHXD 445 


sion. In spite of accidents. In spite of individual 
blundering. 

“It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that 
nobility is so easy as to come slick and true on every 
occasion. . . . 

“If one gives oneself to any long aim one must 
reckon with minor disasters. This Research I 
undertook grows and grows. I believe in it more 
and more. The more it asks from me the more I 
give to it. When I was a youngster I thought the 
thing- 1 wanted was just round the corner. I fancied 
I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just 
what it was, just where it took one, and for the rest 
of my life I would live it. Finely. But I am just 
one of a multitude of men, each one going a little 
wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the 
noble life is a long, long way ahead. . . . We are 
working out a new way of living for mankind, a 
new rule, a new conscience. It’s no small job for 
all of us. There must be lifetimes of building up 
and lifetimes of pulling down and trying again. 
Hope and disappointments and much need for 
philosophy. ... I see myself now for the little 
workman I am upon this tremendous undertaking. 
And all my life hereafter goes to serve it. . . .” 

He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He 
spoke with a grim enthusiasm. “I’m a prig. I’m 
a fanatic, White. But I have something clear, 
something better worth going on with than any 
adventure of personal relationship could possibly 
be. . . 


446 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as 
he could of the faith that had grown up in his mind. 
He spoke with a touch of defiance, with the tense 
force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. 
“I will tell you what I believe.” 

He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and 
of the slow development, expansion and complication 
of his idea of self-respect until he saw that there is no 
honour nor pride for a man until he refers his life to 
ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat 
must be loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern 
aristocrat must also be lucid; there it is that one 
has at once the demand for kingship and the repudia- 
tion of all existing states and kings. In this manner 
he had come to his idea of a great world republic 
that must replace the little warring kingdoms of the 
present, to the conception of an unseen kingship 
ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is 
the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty. “ There,” 
he said, “is the link of our order, the new knighthood, 
the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth. 
There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you ; he 
is latent in all mankind. I have worked this out and 
tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly and 
inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else 
be a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions 
and small occasions I have failed myself a thousand 
times, but no failure lasts if your faith lasts. What 
I have learnt, what I have thought out and made 
sure, I want now to tell the world. Somehow I will 
tell it, as a book I suppose, though I do not know if I 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 447 


shall ever be able to make a book. But I have away 
there in London or with me here all the masses of 
notes I have made in my search for the life that is 
worth while living. ... We who are self-appointed 
aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must 
speak to one another. . . . 

“We can have no organization because organiza- 
tions corrupt. . . . 

“No recognition. . . . 

“But we can speak plainly. . . ” 

(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by 
the jingle and voices of mounted police riding past 
the hotel.) 

“But on one side your aristocracy means revolu- 
tion,” said White. “It becomes a political con- 
spiracy.” 

“Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the 
king upon the stamps and the flag upon the wall. It 
is the continual proclamation of the Republic of 
Mankind.” 


§15 

The earlier phases of violence in the Rand out- 
break in 1913 were manifest rather in the outskirts of 
Johannesburg than at the centre. “Pulling out” 
was going on first at this mine and then that, there 
were riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and 
the smashing up of a number of houses. It was not 
until July the 4th that, with the suppression of a 
public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg 
itself became the storm centre. 


448 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


Benham and White were present at this market- 
place affair, a confused crowded occasion, in which a 
little leaven of active men stirred through a large 
uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. 
The whole big square was astir, a swaying crowd of 
men. A ramshackle platform improvised upon a 
trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to 
a street corner, and there was some speaking. At 
first it seemed as though military men were using this 
platform, and then it was manifestly in possession of 
an excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. 
The military men had said their say and got down. 
They came close by Benham, pushing their way 
across the square. “We’ve warned them,” said one. 
A red flag, like some misunderstood remark at a 
tea-party, was fitfully visible and incomprehensible 
behind the platform. Somebody was either 
pitched or fell off the platform. One could hear 
nothing from the speakers except a minute 
bleating. . . . 

Then there were shouts that the police were charg- 
ing. A number of mounted men trotted into the 
square. The crowd began a series of short rushes 
that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted 
police as they rode to and fro. These men trotted 
through the crowd, scattering knots of people. They 
carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be hit- 
ting with them. It became clear that they aimed at 
the capture of the trolley. There was only a feeble 
struggle for the trolley ; it was captured and hauled 
through the scattered spectators in the square to the 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 449 


protection of a small impassive body of regular 
cavalry at the opposite corner. Then quite a number 
of people seemed to be getting excited and fighting. 
They appeared to be vaguely fighting the foot-police, 
and the police seemed to be vaguely pushing through 
them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one- 
story shop became prominent as a centre of vigorous 
stone-throwing. 

It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal incon- 
secutiveness of human affairs had become exagger- 
ated and pugnacious. A meeting was being pre- 
vented, and the police engaged in the operation 
were being pelted or obstructed. Mostly people 
were just looking on. 

“It amounts to nothing,” said Benham. “Even if 
they held a meeting, what could happen ? Why does 
the Government try to stop it?” 

The drifting and charging and a little booing went 
on for some time. Every now and then some one 
clambered to a point of vantage, began a speech and 
was pulled down by policemen. And at last across 
the confusion came an idea, like a wind across a 
pond. 

The strikers were to go to the Power Station. 

That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. 
The Power Station was the centre of Johannesburg’s 
light and energy. There if anywhere it would be 
possible to express one’s disapproval of the adminis- 
tration, one’s desire to embarrass and confute it. 
One could stop all sorts of things from the Power 
Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the sup- 


450 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


pression of the meeting. Everybody seemed glad- 
dened by a definite project. 

Benham and White went with the crowd. 

At the intersection of two streets they were held up 
for a time ; the scattered drift of people became con- 
gested. Gliding slowly across the mass came an 
electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even 
its glass undamaged, and then another and another. 
Strikers, with the happy expression of men who have 
found something expressive to do, were escorting 
the trams off the street. They were being meticu- 
lously careful with them. Never was there less mob 
violence in a riot. They walked by the captured 
cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured 
by a real lady's company. And when White and 
Benham reached the Power House the marvel grew. 
The rioters were already in possession and going 
freely over the whole place, and they had injured 
nothing. They had stopped the engines, but they 
had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly 
a majority of the people were, like White and Ben- 
ham, merely lookers-on. 

“But this is the most civilized rioting," said Ben- 
ham. “It isn't rioting; it’s drifting. Just as 
things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody has the 
rudder. . . . 

“What maddens me," he said, “is the democracy 
of the whole thing. White! I hate this mod- 
ern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was 
there ever an absurder combination? What is the 
good of a social order in which the men at the top are 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 451 


commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, 
the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and 
opportunity and the conceit that comes with advan- 
tage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of 
aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, 
just an inkling of responsibility, and the place might 
rise instantly out of all this squalor and evil temper. 
. . . What does all this struggle here amount to? 
On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent re- 
sentment on the other ; suspicion everywhere. . . . 

“ And you know, White, at bottom they all want to 
he decent ! 

“If only they had light enough in their brains to 
show them how. 

“It’s such a plain job they have here too, a new 
city, the simplest industries, freedom from war, every- 
thing to make a good life for men, prosperity, glorious 
sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And mis- 
management, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, 
stupidity, poison it all. A squabble about work- 
ing on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble embittered 
by this universal shadow of miner’s phthisis that the 
masters were too incapable and too mean to prevent. 

“Oh, God!” cried Benham, “when will men be 
princes and take hold of life? When will the king- 
ship in us wake up and come to its own ? . . . Look 
at this place ! Look at this place ! . . . The easy, 
accessible happiness ! The manifest prosperity. 
The newness and the sunshine. And the silly 
bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries ! . . 

And then: “It’s not our quarrel. . . 


452 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


“It’s amazing how every human quarrel draws one 
in to take sides. Life is one long struggle against the 
incidental. I can feel my anger gathering against 
the Government here in spite of my reason. I want 
to go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that 
I ought to go off to Lord Gladstone or Botha and 
expostulate. . . . What good would it do? They 
move in the magic circles of their own limitations, 
an official, a politician — how would they put it ? — 
‘ with many things to consider. . . .’ 

“It’s my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It’s 
a thing I have to guard against. . . . 

“What does it all amount to? It is like a fight 
between navvies in a tunnel to settle the position of 
the Pole star. It doesn’t concern us. . . . Oh ! it 
doesn’t indeed concern us. It’s a scuffle in the dark- 
ness, and our business, the business of all brains, the 
only permanent good work is to light up the world. 
. . . There will be mischief and hatred here and 
suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things 
will go on again, a little better or a little worse. ...” 

“I’m tired of this place, White, and of all such 
places. I’m tired of the shouting and running, the 
beating and shooting. I’m sick of all the confusions 
of life’s experience, which tells only of one need 
amidst an endless multitude of distresses. I’ve seen 
my fill of wars and disputes and struggles. I see 
now how a man may grow weary at last of life and 
its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blun- 
ders and its remorse. No ! I want to begin upon 
the realities I have made for myself. For they 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID do 3 


are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet 
corner where I can polish what I have learnt, sort 
out my accumulations, be undisturbed by these 
transitory symptomatic things. . . . 

“What was that boy saying? They are burning 
the Star office. . . . Well, let them. . . .” 

And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aver- 
sion, from the things that hurried through the night 
about them, from the red flare in the sky and the 
distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights 
down side streets, he began to talk again of aristoc- 
racy and the making of greatness and a new great 
spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he said, must 
be given to that. He would say his thing plainly 
and honestly and afterwards other men would say 
it clearly and beautifully ; here it would touch a man 
and there it would touch a man ; the Invisible King 
in us all would find himself and know himself a little 
I in this and a little in that, and at last a day would 
come, when fair things and fine things would rule 
the world and such squalor as this about them would 
be as impossible any more for men as a Stone Age 
Corroboree. . . . 

Late or soon ? 

Benham sought for some loose large measure of 
time. 

“Before those constellations above us have changed 
their shapes. . . . 

“Does it matter if we work at something that will 
take a hundred years or ten thousand years ? It will 
never come in our lives, White. Not soon enough for 


454 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 

that. But after that everything will be soon — when 
one comes to death then everything is at one’s finger- 
tips — I can feel that greater world I shall never see 
as one feels the dawn coming through the last dark- 
ness. ...” 

§ 16 

The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham 
and White were at lunch in the dining-room at the 
Sherborough on the day following the burning of 
the Star office. The Sherborough dining-room was 
on the first floor, and the Venetian window beside 
their table opened on to a verandah above a piazza. 
As they talked they became aware of an excitement 
in the street below, shouting and running and then a 
sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of soldiers 
marching quickly. White stood up and looked. 
“ They’re seizing the stuff in the gunshops,” he said, 
sitting down again. “It’s amazing they haven’t 
done it before.” 

They went on eating and discussing the work of a 
medical mission at Mukden that had won Benham’s 
admiration. . . . 

A revolver cracked in the street and there was a 
sound of glass smashing. Then more revolver shots. 
“That’s at the big club at the corner, I think,” said 
Benham and went out upon the verandah. 

Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Out- 
side the Rand Club in the cross street a considerable 
mass of people had accumulated, and was being 
hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 455 


the street people were looking in the direction of the 
market-place and then suddenly a rush of figures 
flooded round the corner, first a froth of scattered 
individuals and then a mass, a column, marching 
with an appearance of order and waving a flag. It 
was a poorly disciplined body, it fringed out into a 
swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the side 
walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They 
seemed to be differing about the direction of the 
whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the other with 
his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then 
turned with a triumphant gesture to the following 
ranks, waving his arms in the air. He was a tall 
lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and wild- 
eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the 
hotel. 

And then up the street something happened. 
Benham’s attention was turned round to it by a 
checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the 
part of the advancing procession under the verandah. 

The roadway beyond the club had suddenly be- 
come clear. Across it a dozen soldiers had appeared 
and dismounted methodically and lined out, with 
their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at 
the club corner had vanished, and the people there 
had swayed about towards this new threat. Quite 
abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased. 
Understanding seized upon every one. 

These soldiers were going to fire. . . . 

The brown uniformed figures moved like autom- 
ata ; the rifle shots rang out almost in one report . . . . 


456 


THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways 
and side streets, an enquiring pause, the darting back 
of a number of individuals into the roadway and 
then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. 
The soldiers had fired in the air. 

‘ 1 But this is a stupid game, ’ ’ said Benham. ‘ 1 Why 
did they fire at all?” 

The tall man who had led the mob had run out into 
the middle of the road. His commando was a little 
disposed to assume a marginal position, and it had to j 
be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see 
his face. For a time it looked anxious and thought- j 
ful. Then he seemed to jump to his decision. He 
unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if defying 
the soldiers. “ Shoot,” he bawled, “ Shoot, if you 
dare !” 

A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered \ 
him. The small figure of the officer away there was \ 
inaudible. The coat of the man below flapped like 
the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty , 
shirt, the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, i 
“Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if you dare! See!” j 

Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and j 
in the instant the leader collapsed in the road, a | 
sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen bullets. It was | 
an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had 
been deflated. It was incredible that a moment J 
before this thing had been a man, an individual, a \ 
hesitating complicated purpose. 

“Good God!” cried Benham, “but — this is I 
horrible!” 


THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID 457 


The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that 
stretched out towards the soldiers never twitched. 

The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of 
sounds, women shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some 
sought a corner from which they might still see, 
others pressed forward. “Go for the swine !” bawled 
a voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the 
people, and in the road below a man with a rifle 
halted, took aim, and answered the soldiers 7 fire. 
“Look out ! 7 7 cried White who was watching the 
soldiers, and ducked. “This isn’t in the air ! 77 

Came a straggling volley again, like a man running 
a metal hammer very rapidly along iron corrugations, 
and this time people were dropping all over the road. 
One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell 
with a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for 
some yards with blood running abundantly from his 
neck, and fell and never stirred again. Another 
went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway 
and lay wringing his hands faster and faster until 
suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped 
inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel 
suit ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to 
be holding something red and strange to his face 
with both hands ; above them his eyes were round 
and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. 
He went right past the hotel and stumbled and 
suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite corner. 
The majority of the crowd had already vanished into 
doorways and side streets. But there was still 
shouting and there was still a remnant of amazed 


458 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


and angry men in the roadway — and one or two 
angry women. They were not fighting. Indeed 
they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons 
now they would certainly have used them. 

“But this is preposterous!” cried Benham. 
“Preposterous. Those soldiers are never going to 
shoot again ! This must stop.” 

He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned 
about and dashed for the staircase. “Good 
Heaven!” cried White. “What are you going to 
do?” 

Benham was going to stop that conflict very much 
as a man might go to stop a clock that is striking 
unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going to 
stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity. 

White hesitated for a moment and then followed, 
crying “Benham ! ” 

But there was no arresting this last outbreak of 
Benham’s all too impatient kingship. He pushed 
aside a ducking German waiter who was peeping 
through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. 
With a gesture of authority he ran forward into the 
middle of the street, holding up his hand, in which he 
still held his dinner napkin clenched like a bomb. 
White believes firmly that Benham thought he would 
be able to dominate everything. He shouted out 
something about “Foolery!” 

Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sub- 
lime indifference to current things. . . . 

But the carbines spoke again. 

Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against some- 


THE NEW HAEOUN AL EASCHID 459 


thing invisible. He spun right round and fell down 
into a sitting position. He sat looking surprised. 

After one moment of blank funk White drew out 
his pocket handkerchief, held it arm high by way 
of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of the 
hotel. 


§17 

“Are you hit?” cried White dropping to his 
knees and making himself as compact as possible. 
“Benham!” 

Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought 
answered in a strange voice, a whisper into which a 
whistling note had been mixed. 

“It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my 
quarrel. Faults on both sides. And now I can’t 
get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself to- 
gether. Perhaps I’m — I must be shot. But it 
seemed to come — inside me. ... If I should be 
hurt. Am I hurt ? . . . Will you see to that book 
of mine, White? It’s odd. A kind of faintness. 
. . . What?” 

“I will see after your book,” said White and glanced 
at his hand because it felt wet, and was astonished to 
discover it bright red. He forgot about himself then, 
and the fresh flight of bullets down the street. 

The immediate effect of this blood was that he said 
something more about the book, a promise, a definite 
promise. He could never recall his exact words, but 
their intention was binding. He conveyed his 
absolute acquiescence with Benham’s wishes what- 


460 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT 


ever they were. His life for that moment was 
unreservedly at his friend’s disposal. . . . 

White never knew if his promise was heard. Ben- 
ham had stopped speaking quite abruptly with that 
“What?” 

He stared in front of him with a doubtful expres- 
sion, like a man who is going to be sick, and then, in 
an instant, every muscle seemed to give way, he 
shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead 
man in his arms. 


ft* 


THE END 







Printed in the United States of America. 





































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